A weather watcher who monitors severe storms on Lake Erie is sounding the alarm on what he says is shaping up to be a potentially destructive year ahead on the lake that laps Southwestern Ontario.
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A weather watcher who monitors severe storms on Lake Erie is sounding the alarm on what he says is shaping up to be a potentially destructive year ahead on the lake that laps Southwestern Ontario.
Self-described weather nerd Rick O’Banion, who tweets as Storm Watch-Lake Erie on X, formerly known as Twitter, said last year’s El Nino brought a very warm winter and with it above average lake temperatures.
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El Nino is a weather pattern that can last months or even years that brings warm water to America’s west coast, creating drier and warmer weather than usual in Canada and the northern United States.
Lake Erie is the southernmost and shallowest of all the Great Lakes.
“The lake didn’t freeze, not even the little bays froze,” O’Banion said. “That made everything much more warmer than normal.
“You automatically have a head start on the lake warming up.”
Through his research using artificial intelligence, O’Banion came up with some predictions of what could happen if the lake reaches temperatures as high as 30.5 C this year. In the 1980s, lake temperatures hit 29.5 C, he said.
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“The ramification for something like that would be massive fish die-offs, bird and wild life die-offs, water degradations, harm to all the beaches, and damage to commercial fisheries,” he said.
With meteorologists predicting La Nina – a weather pattern the opposite of El Nino that brings cooler temperatures to this region – arriving later year, it may set the stage for severe weather in the regions around Lake Erie.
“Now, we’re going back into that La Nina cycle but with a superheated lake,” he said. “All the ingredients are there for severe things to happen.”
Five of the top recorded storms to hit Lake Erie happened during a La Nina cycle, O’Banion said.
He points out much will depend on whether falling rain continues to moderate the lake.
“Whether or not it will happen, you can’t say,” he said.
Environment Canada meteorologist Gerald Cheng said when it comes to weather forecasting “there is always uncertainty.
“In the winter, the jet streams could be pulling more systems into the area if La Nina does pan out but it might not be that strong,” he said. “The winter months are six months away. There is a lot of data that could change.”
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Elgin County Warden Ed Ketchabaw said the municipality recently hosted a severe weather workshop drawing together emergency management people, first responders, communication experts and policy advisers “to come up with better ways to be prepared when these storms happen.
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“We’ve witnessed weather change over decades and its getting more and more severe,” he said. “We have to find a way to work with industry experts to understand what has happened, what is happening and how we become better prepared to respond to them.”
Ketchabaw recalls the Christmas storm of 2022, when thousands on the north shore of Lake Erie went without power for 72 hours and limited or no cellphone service for days while temperatures plunged into the double digits below freezing.
Winds raged to more than 120 kilometres an hour causing snow squalls with whiteout conditions.
Ambulances couldn’t respond to emergencies due to the weather conditions and downed trees. Local residents didn’t know where to get help.
“We can plan for severe weather if we understand it,” Ketchabaw said.
Michael McKay, executive director of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor, said this year temperatures in Lake Erie have reached as high as 24 C in the western basin near Toledo.
Normally at this time of year, it would be in the upper teens, he said.
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McKay said his concern is the warm temperatures will make conditions ripe for toxic bacteria blooms in Lake Erie.
The lake has been plagued by growth of cyanobacteria, also called blue-green algae even though it is not an algae, in recent years, a threat to drinking water intakes, marine life and tourism.
“To have these blooms, you need to have nutrients and you need to have warmer temperatures,” McKay said.
A problem especially in the lake’s western basin, one colony a few years ago grew almost as large as Prince Edward Island.
The bacterial blooms, which have taken off in the warm, shallow waters of Lake Erie since the mid-1990s, can contribute to dead zones in the lake, and produce toxins that can be lethal to pets and harmful to people.
“In the past we typically wouldn’t see the blooms until later in July, but they are already happening,” McKay said.
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