Four of the five Great Lakes should set new records for annual average high surface temperatures in 2024, according to NOAA satellite data collected in early December by the agency’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
Only the largest, deepest and northernmost lake, Lake Superior, has failed to break its year-to-date average surface temperature record for this year. But Lake Superior was within a half-degree of doing so in early December, NOAA said.
“Despite a recent period of colder weather that resulted in locally significant lake effect snow from Thanksgiving through the first week of December, lake surface temperatures still remained above average,” Gabrielle Farina and Haley Thiem wrote in a NOAA blog post.
The year-to-date temperature records follow two consecutive fall seasons with above-average temperatures and one of the warmest winters on record in the Great Lakes region in 2023-24.
