Those of you who remember early December lake ice are probably thinking of December 1989. That was a record-cold month in a lot of places throughout the central and eastern US. I was observing weather in the Boston area at the time, and measured 4 inches of snow at Thanksgiving, followed by a low of minus-4 (F) the next morning (by radiational cooling.) That kind of cold continued for most of that December. The lake was frozen by mid-December that year.
December 1989 still serves as a comparison for any cold wave that occurs in the central and eastern US.
You may also remember the winters of 1992-1995, which were known for being very cold and snowy around here. Weather geeks sometimes call them "the Pinatubo winters," because Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines had gone off (spectacularly), putting an ash cloud in the upper atmosphere where it filtered out sunlight for a while. There have been volcanic eruptions lately but nothing like Pinatubo (thankfully,) because that cold spell reduced crop yields on a large scale. As you may have noticed from supermarket prices lately, we don't have room in our wallets for "cold surprises" like Pinatubo eruptions anymore.
January 2004 was another famous, record-breaking, record-setting cold spell in New England.
Human memories are a funny thing. I recently went back in official weather records to find the snow and cold I remember, but the numbers I found are not as impressive as I thought they'd be. For example, if you remember an entire winter being cold, that's probably not the case, because in New England that almost never happens. It's always changing patterns. Your memory of a certain type of weather might be of just one storm, or just one week/month, and over time your brain expands it ("The Fish Story" concept.)
There are numerous cycles that affect the weather we get, we haven't discovered them all yet (some are beyond earth, in space) and these cycles can form more combinations than paint colors at Home Depot. Therefore it is hard to predict their repetitions. We could re-enter a cycle from 10 years ago, but this time around it could be combined with another cycle from 50 years ago, and the last time those two cycles coincided might have been 500 years ago. That's a simplified example.
As if the above cycles weren't enough to render the Rotary Derby's conditions totally unpredictable, there are even more factors influencing the lake ice. The freeze and thaw dates, and the integrity of the ice all winter long, depends on even more factors, in which timing makes a big difference. One example: If you have a big snowstorm just days after the ice freezes, it could render the ice weak for the rest of the winter no matter how cold the air gets. Snow is an insulator, and it doesn't form very strong lake ice. The strongest ice occurs when the lake lies still (no wind), in extreme cold, for a couple of weeks at the shortest days of the year, clear skies and calm wind every night, without any snow accumulating on it.
In mid-January the sun starts to get noticeably higher in the sky (the shortest day/lowest sun of the year is the first day of winter in December). About a month after the shortest day, the sun starts to play a melting role on the lake ice. At that point it is necessary to have a good layer of snow on the ice to insulate it from the sun.
Moral of the story: With so many factors influencing the local weather, and even more factors influencing the lake ice, whatever conditions happened in any Rotary Derby of the past are probably not due for an exact repeat. At all.
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