[Stuart Carlton]
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to Teach Me About the Great Lakes, a twice monthly podcast in which I, a Great Lakes novice, a Great Lakes novice, the old GLN, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes.

My name is Stuart Carlton, and I know a lot about the tabla drums that you emit from your radiator right when you want to start recording, making it very challenging to start recording unless you turn up the heater to the extent where you start to sweat during the recording. Maybe sweat enough that you can hear that in the microphone. But I do not know a lot about the Great Lakes.

That's the purpose of this here show. We're joined today by the one, the only, the special Meg of the Lake lover, Gunn. Megan, how's it going?

[Megan Gunn]
It's going well. It is cold outside, but I also have experience wearing my coat and speed walking.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah.

[Megan Gunn]
And then all the sweat in this.

[Stuart Carlton]
The sweat.

[Megan Gunn]
15 degrees.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, I got this electric vest thing. So sweet. Anyway, we're also joined today by the Big Tuna himself, Natty Morrison.

How's it going?

[Natty Morrison]
Oh, it's going great. Loving it. Love that that's my new nickname, by the way. Am I showing on the screen?

[Stuart Carlton]
I don't know. Did you join in?

I will add you.

[Natty Morrison]
I did.

[Stuart Carlton]
Okay. Yeah. There you are. Yeah. There's the Big Tuna. All right.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah. I just, yeah. I don't know what to say about the nickname.

I regret having ever told anybody that. Okay.

[Megan Gunn]
We love this story. I love this story.

[Stuart Carlton]
I told you I tried. So Natty let it out that he, every now and again, not every time, would, when he's, when he's making tuna, he would just take a little, just a, just a little sip of the, uh, the tuna juice, um, just to try it and to not waste it. Right.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
And so. Yeah.

[Natty Morrison]
I did say that. And now it's become a point of conversation about this. My fiance was like, you just need to be careful about revealing weird stuff about yourself because, you know, you reveal one weird thing and then the next thing, and then you're the weird guy who's drinking tuna juice and all the other.

And I was like, it's just, I feel very regretful of this and I love being introduced this way. It's very nice to meet you, Eric.

[Stuart Carlton]
The thing is this though, the thing is this in between now and then, you know what I did? I tried a little bit.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
It's good.

[Natty Morrison]
It's not bad, right?

[Stuart Carlton]
No, no, it's good. It's not bad. Yeah.

Yeah. I tried it anyway. So I don't know it's a recommendation, but anyway, that's not the point.

We like to open our show every week with a Ask Megan question. If you have an Ask Megan question, send it to teachmeaboutthegreatlakes at gmail.com. This question is this, it's from The Great Less.

Megan, it is the season of love and you are known as the lake lover.

[Megan Gunn]
That is my nickname.

[Stuart Carlton]
That's right.

If the five Great Lakes were suitors on The Bachelorette, which I've never seen, but that's a TV show where you get all these bachelorettes and you get one bachelor typically, and then he gives them roses, right? And then he says, you were the bachelorette for me. And then I'm not sure what happens after that.

Anyway, who's getting your final rose this year? Which lake? And who's going home crying in the limo?

[Megan Gunn]
So it would have to be Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan is my forever love.

[Stuart Carlton]
Forever love.

[Megan Gunn]
That's where I grew up and playing in her lovely waters in my backyard.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah.

[Megan Gunn]
And I would have to send home Lake Erie probably because ick.

[Stuart Carlton]
Okay.

[Natty Morrison]
Would that be the first one to go home?

[Megan Gunn]
Probably yes. If it was, if I had to choose, that's a great question. If I had to choose, like I had one final rose and it would be between one and the other.

I don't know. Maybe like Huron?

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah. Erie would be watching from home.

[Megan Gunn]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Natty Morrison]
You have to trust the process.

[Stuart Carlton]
There it is. There it is.

If you have a question for Megan, send it to teachingaboutthegreatlakesatgmail.com. But that's actually not the reason that we're here. Nope.

I'm supposed to say that later. Instead, what I'm going to say now is we've got a cool interview lined up today. I saw this paper come out.

That's not true. I saw this paper a bit after it had come out, kind of a cool thing on lake ice. And I said, we have to talk about this.

And I saw that the authors on the paper, which I am about to find the link to, sorry, Eric Anderson, Google Scholar. So I get the name right. But the authors on the paper were two former teaching about the Great Lakes guests.

So I said, we have connections and the name of the paper will be something that I give you very soon.

[Megan Gunn]
I just put it in the.

[Stuart Carlton]
Did you?

[Megan Gunn]
File.

[Stuart Carlton]
Aren't you fancy? All right. Thank you.

I should have had that. What happened? I thought I had the link in there.

[Megan Gunn]
It was in the email.

[Stuart Carlton]
Anyway, about the relationship between. All right. I don't remember what I said.

So I was going through trying to, you know, I like to keep up on the Great Lakes news. It's what I do. It's part of my job.

And so I saw this paper by our old friends, Eric Anderson and Drew Grunewald about ice cap cover. This is out just a couple of months ago in Geophysical Research Letters, which is a fancy sounding journal. I like any journal that's like letters because it's like you sit around in your tweed jacket and you compose letters and you send them off.

But anyway, this is called Does Ice Cover Cap Evaporation in Large Lakes? Anyway, so it's about this relationship between ice cover, which has been super low in recent years, not this year, and evaporation and lake stuff and lake levels and all this. And so I was like, this is right.

Perfect for us. So I called up Eric and I said, Eric, we must go on the show. And Eric said, yes, we must.

But first, of course. Teach us about the Great Lakes. Our guest today is Dr. Eric Anderson. He's an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering and the director, the director of the hydrologic science and engineering program at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Eric, thank you for coming on.

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah, thanks for having me back.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, this is great. Eric taught us all about modeling a few years ago. The episode is called A Million Little Triangles, I think.

And so Eric does a lot of modeling work, which is increasingly critical to everyday life, frankly. But here we are to talk about your paper. So first, though, we have a new segment, which I'm renamed Explain It to My Grandma.

And so what we want to do is we've learned that naturally, the further we go on, the more people start, you know, they start listening in a commute and then the commute ends and they maybe we want to get the we want to get to the good stuff first. So explain it to my grandma with the slight caveat that all my grandma's are dead. So I would need to

[Megan Gunn]
Explain it to Megan's grandma.

[Stuart Carlton]
Explain it to Megan's grandma. My grandma would not be like, let me go nuts. Anyway, so in 60 seconds or less, what does this paper say?

[Eric Anderson]
Okay, I'd say if you're like me, and you put a coffee cup on your desk filled with coffee before the semester break, and then you leave and come back, you know, in January, and the coffee is evaporated and left is like a dark, weird stain at the bottom. That's because that coffee evaporated up into the air. Right.

And you could have stopped that by maybe putting a lid on it. And then I guess drinking when you came back a month later. But that the liquid, the coffee would still be in there.

And so if we think about that analogy in the lakes, when there's evaporation happening, which is pretty much in the wintertime, ice could be that lid. And it's easy to think about it being that way. And basically, what we find in this paper is that it's not so simple.

Our our ice lid really just has a bunch of holes in it. And so it doesn't keep that water in the lake.

[Stuart Carlton]
Boom, done. All right. Yeah, great. So let's go into detail.

So right. So this has traditionally been the story that there's a strong relationship between ice cover and lake level. And heavy ice cover means less evaporation and therefore higher lake levels.

And that's always been kind of the story now was in was there science to back that up? Or is that just an assumption based on metaphors like your your coffee cup metaphor?

[Eric Anderson]
I think I mean, it it makes sense on a couple levels. I think one is that that lid metaphor still still holds on a certain scale. I guess that's the caveat.

But like if you have some water and you block it with something like a chunk of ice, yeah, that that water is not, you know, evaporating up in the sky right at that point. And then also the you know, all this stuff is tied together with the atmosphere. And so you have kind of warmer climates and therefore less ice in there, more evaporation happening, like all that is real and happening.

And so the science is there. I think what you know, is important is the nuance actually how that plays out. And in the Great Lakes specifically, or I should say maybe just big lakes.

So this isn't a small lake thing. We can talk about why those are act a little different. But the way the nuance there and how that plays out actually is kind of the surprise, I guess.

[Megan Gunn]
So when I was going through the paper, it made me think like, if if the ice was completely covering everything, that like our lid example, that would be one thing. But that's not really what ice is doing, right? Like that the edges aren't necessarily fully covered in the ice is moving.

I heard heard a lot about shelf ice recently. And so the ice is moving and things are exposed. So does that play a part in what's actually happening in reality or how we thought what was happening is not necessarily happening anymore?

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. So on a small lake, I think it's easier to picture a pond scale, let's say something you can see across in the winter.

Those pretty much get frozen. You know, one's up north enough. Those get frozen over solid.

Basically, you can walk across it and it's probably safe. And in that sense, that's that's a nice lid example where that is plugging up the evaporation, really shutting that down in lakes as big as the Great Lakes. Full ice coverage across the whole lake is doesn't really happen.

Yeah, yeah. We'll say I haven't tracked it. You know, I don't have a stat in front of you.

I remember a few years ago in like Superior, maybe iced over for a few hours. And it was like this first or second time in 40 years. And even then, there's probably some open water somewhere.

But largely, it looks like it's frozen over. So but the general rule is it doesn't really happen for most of the lakes. Erie is kind of the exception where it gets heavy ice cover in most years.

Ontario, almost no ice cover in most years. Michigan, Huron and Superior are kind of a mixed bag, but you know, not not getting to to like a full ice coverage like you see on a small lake. And so you're really never in a situation with these size of lakes, where you have complete ice cover.

And I think that's a little surprising to probably anybody not looking at satellite images. Yeah, if you go to the lakeshore, and look out and you might see ice and a good ice here, like as far as your eye can see, and it just feels and it's wintry and cold. And it feels like it's just a nice covered lake.

But reality is that probably and again, in Superior, Michigan, and Huron only extends so far and then you have open water out in the middle. And so that that shoreline perception I think is can be misleading, that again, that kind of like space scale view of what's happening, or at least plane scale, if you're flying up over top of it, isn't easy for most people to see and I think get a feel for.

[Megan Gunn]
Is that why you chose the modeling approach? Because this is something different than what our eyes can see?

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, what even got you let's take a step back even from there, right? And what even got you thinking like, I want to study, you know, like, so I want to study this, this is what I want to do. Like, how did you get to think that maybe this is something you can bring your modeling approach to?

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah, I will say that the conversation that led to this whole thing happened at the Great Lakes Conference, Agler, two years ago in Windsor. So sitting there, talking to my co author, Drew Grumwald, and this idea came up. And that led to a conversation about what do we really think is happening?

Do we think ice plays this role? And the reason we even said that is because that concept gets mentioned a lot of times. So I think you see it, you know, maybe on the news, when it's being covered in terms of like, the weather report or something about Great Lakes ice and what that means for lake levels and evaporation.

And then but we are even at a conference where we heard people say it there, you know, like, okay, well, then ice formed and shut down the evaporation. You know, I'm sure I've said it too.

[Stuart Carlton]
And people said it on this very show.

[Eric Anderson]
I should check that. But you know, so I think we we just started thinking about what that if that process really would play out that way in the Great Lakes. And partially from we actually started from a slightly different angle, which is not even thinking about the full ice coverage piece, which ended up being the important part here.

But just like in the winter, in a cold winter, that cold air just doesn't hold as much water vapor as a warm air does. That's kind of the climate change problem, right? So the air warms up, it can hold more moisture.

And therefore it can suck up more water from from lakes like these in cold dry air, although it may be dry and can suck up water, it just doesn't have the capacity to hold as much. So like I was in class, I'm always like, imagine if your water bottle suddenly like got bigger with if you know, in a warm air situation, or in a colder situation, it gets much, much smaller can't hold as much. We actually started with that angle.

And that but that led to us going, okay, let's figure this out. And the way to do that, really on lakes like this scale and everything is modeling, we just can't get the observations that we need to capture every angle. And we can talk about what obs are out there, which are pretty cool and unique.

But really, this became a modeling scenario and kind of a what if and we get with models, you can do some magic sometimes like make unrealistic things happen for the purpose of, you know, kind of testing it. And so that was a pretty easy and fun pathway for this to play out.

[Megan Gunn]
And so you all did that. And you came up with like actual answers you like, you're now able to see we are now able to see how ice coverage is actually impacting our lake evaporation. And our lake levels.

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah, totally. And you know, I think the we actually came at it from a couple ways in their modeling was one and that's, I'm mostly a modeler. And so everything's like a modeling exercise for me.

But we actually, you know, we have satellite observations of ice cover going back to, you know, the dawn of satellites. And before that, it was observations that are always confusing to me how they got those. But back to the 70s, Noah Glerl has records of that going back to the 70s.

[Stuart Carlton]
Could have all the captain and a bottle of whiskey.

[Eric Anderson]
And we have now evaporation is a tricky one. We don't have like, good direct measures of like whole lake evaporation.

That's that you can't get that. But my co author, Drew has a fancy statistical approach to try to come up with what the lake evaporation is monthly, again, going back 50 years or something. We started by looking at those data sets and just said like, okay, in big ice winters, do we have big evaporation or small evaporation?

And same thing when it's mild winters out there. And the data actually shows us that yeah, ice, you know, doesn't have it's not like ice forms and you shut down evaporation. We weren't seeing that.

And that got us looking at like, okay, it's just this partial ice question or like you're, you know, you got holes in your lid that that must be what's going on. And then we could use the model to say, okay, is that is that really what's happening?

[Natty Morrison]
And this is coming, this is a question from somebody who is, I wouldn't even say a modeling novice, somebody who's maybe doesn't understand what modeling is, but what exactly goes into developing a model like this?

[Eric Anderson]
Okay, I'm going to talk to the physical side stuff that I did, because the statistical model that Drew worked on, it's too fancy for me to explain what happens there. I'll say it's Bayesian statistics. And I'll stop with that word on the physical model side.

So, you know, I think it's a combination of like we in the physics world, we're blessed with having some governing laws, right? Not like the biology world where things are very complicated and we don't have these kind of, I think things to rest on. So we start with like some fundamental laws that tell us that mass is conserved and energy conserved and things like that.

And then we pull in data sets like that help us with some of the empirical kind of pieces that we just aren't smart enough to solve for ourselves. And so an easy one to think about is like turbulence. We just don't understand turbulence, but we know it's important to fix things.

And so we can kind of parameterize that effect using some observations or experimental approaches that somebody took. So that's kind of the backbone of these models is we have these like fancy equations that we think govern how the universe works and how the lakes work and everything. And then where we can't quite solve or like get the physics detailed enough, we stick in some observations like, well, here's what we saw.

Here's how wind and evaporation interact. And we can stick that in that model kind of in, you know, surrounded by some good kind of Newton-esque solutions to equations and help figure this out. Specifically what goes into that from this case is like, tell me the air temperature above the lake, the solar radiation coming down, the humidity right above the lake, so how moist it is up there.

And if you tell me that, we can run these models of the lakes and it will tell you back what the water temperatures are, the currents, whether there's ice or not, and kind of try to predict those things. So that's kind of what goes in and what we're trying to predict out of that model.

[Natty Morrison]
And is there a need to effectively like, so prove it sort of deal? Like how are those models then verified as being like, yeah, that worked, this is accurate, or how does that work?

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah. So in this case, we're relying on some proof that the model works for doing the kind of bread and butter things it's supposed to do. And then we used it for some wild unrealistic scenarios in this paper that we can't measure, and that's where the model's handy.

But what do we compare that to? So the model's predicting water temperatures, so we can measure water temperatures from space on the surface, and we compare the model to that.

[Natty Morrison]
That is wild.

[Eric Anderson]
I say we like that, I'm not doing that.

[Natty Morrison]
No, I was like, I'm assuming that it's you. Today, later when I talk to somebody, I'll be like, dude, I met the czar for water temperature.

[Eric Anderson]
And we also stick things in the lake, you know, put thermometers in the lake all over the place, and from top to bottom in some places, and buoys are measuring water temperatures. So we have these in-situ measurements of what's going on. In this case, temperature is the big important piece, but the same happens for currents and water quality parameters and stuff.

Ice, you can see from space, so we can kind of get a good idea of how much ice coverage is out there, and if the model is predicting those things well or not. So that's really how we build some confidence that this model's acting like nature would have it.

[Natty Morrison]
Excellent.

[Stuart Carlton]
And so then with that, so what you found, like big picture, is that these atmospheric conditions are really a bigger contributor than ice coverage, right? Was that fair to say, based on your findings?

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah. You know, if ice was totally covering the lake, that would be a big important thing, of course. But I guess the atmosphere is driving it, which isn't surprising, right?

I guess that piece is like, well, of course it is. We would think that. But it gets at that, it kind of refocuses what people normally think, which is ice is blocking evaporation.

It's like, well, no, really, the atmosphere is controlling everything. And so there's a couple of interesting things about that. One is when you have a lot of evaporation in the fall in the Great Lakes, that evaporation cools the lakes, so the lakes are cooling down because that's happening.

And it can drive them into a heavy ice season, right? Just so you have high evaporation that leads to high ice, that kind of ordering, I guess. But the other piece of it, too, is the atmosphere is, if that air that blows over the lake is dry and has room to suck up moisture, that's going to happen, right?

If that air is kind of close, you know, saturated and doesn't have as much room for any more moisture, then moisture is not going to transfer whether or not that's open or not. So the atmosphere is the big driver here. And kind of the important pieces are that humidity and then the wind speed, right?

So when you blow over your bowl of soup to cool it down, right, you are doing what that wind is doing to the lake, and you're kind of accelerating how much heat can be pulled out of that bowl of soup, and therefore the wind's doing the same thing in the Great Lakes. The faster that blows, the more heat it pulls out of the lake. And so those pieces are really important.

Then the ice kind of responds to those things. So the ice, it's not insignificant, but it's not the dominant storyline.

[Megan Gunn]
Okay, so have you found, and I think that this is related, if we had a super hot summer, we still have super hot Septembers and Octobers, does that change the evaporation and the ice cover that we're going to get later? Or does the cooling happen regardless, and that's not necessarily affecting the ice cover? Does that make sense?

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah, great question. So we kind of had it this year. So in the fall, the lake temperatures were quite warm, extended into, I don't know, September, maybe even October, warmer than typical.

And the question was like, what does that mean for ice? These lakes are hot, basically like hot relatively. And so what's going to happen?

And it really all depends on what the air and the atmosphere does now. And so like right now, we've been in a cold blast in the Great Lakes that has formed all this ice, even though we were with really hot water in the lakes in the fall. So it really, that it's like the air can change everything, right?

And so what you had with those warm lakes in the fall, right, that they were warm, cold air comes across, you're going to get a lot of evaporation. So that might boost that signal at that time. But depending on what the atmosphere does in say January and February, that will dictate basically how cold the lakes get, if they get to an ice state and all that kind of stuff.

So that's what makes like projecting these things out so hard, because you could say, well, we're hot in September. Does that mean we're going to have low ice in January? Well, it depends what January's atmosphere does.

[Stuart Carlton]
Interesting. All right, we are going to take a little break. When we come back, I'm going to have some shocking Great Lakes factoids about lake ice that Claude has been crunching in the background while Eric has been talking.

And Eric's going to tell us what his work means. And we're going to play the most exciting game maybe that's ever been invented. You're listening to teach me about the Great Lakes.

All right, we're back with Eric Anderson. You're listening to teach me about the Great Lakes, twice monthly podcast, which I ask people to teach us all about the Great Lakes. Stuart Carlton, joined by Megan, a lake lover Gunn, Natty Shaw Morrison.

[Natty Morrison]
Thank you.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yes, you're welcome. He was afraid I was going to call him the big tuna.

[Natty Morrison]
You just did.

[Stuart Carlton]
We're talking with Eric Anderson today about a cool paper he did that, that I don't know, maybe it's overstating. It might revolutionize our understanding of large lake ice processes, which is pretty amazing. And he's going to tell us what exactly that means.

But first, we got some cool Great Lakes, lake ice. Well, now hold on. I might not be able to give you these because I'll be honest, I don't believe what Claude is telling me.

[Natty Morrison]
Well, that's where they're unbelievable.

[Stuart Carlton]
Just say them. Literally unbelievable lake ice coverage. So instead, I'll do this.

All right, here we go. Instead, what I'll do is you will go to, you can go to GLERL, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, where they have ice cover data. And it can show you the current conditions where ice cover is actually pretty high right now because it's been freaking cold.

But then they also have maximum ice cover plots. And so Eric was talking about how recently Lake Superior might've been close to 100%. And here's what I'm going to say.

I'm going to give you a Great Lakes factoid about lake ice and Lake Superior. But first, it's a Great Lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid. It's a great factoid about the Great Lakes.

Lake Superior did reach 100% ice cover in 1996, March of 1996. The time Eric was probably thinking of would have been 2019. Got to 94.9% 2019. Lake Erie. I should run a, you know what? I'm going to make, I'm sorry.

That's how we got to do it. Lake Erie. Lake Erie has reached 100% ice coverage three times since GLERL began tracking in 1973.

Most recently in 1996 in February. So about a month before Lake Superior. So there you go.

Lake ice coverage. Pretty cool. All right.

So Eric, if I'm going to sum up your paper here for Megan's grandma, I will do it less eloquently, but basically people thought that the amount of ice coverage was a really large determinant in evaporation in their four lake levels. And what you and your colleague Drew Grunewald found was that while ice coverage plays a part, atmospheric conditions play a very significant part too, and maybe even a bigger part depending on the specific year and the specific conditions. So that strikes me as completely changing our understanding of how this process works.

And some academics would say this changes forever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the others are more humble and say, well, if you made an incremental, all right, I don't, you know, you could be either kind of academic. They both work.

But, but so what does this mean? Like, what does this both for your field, but then also for people going forward? Like, how do we use this info?

[Eric Anderson]
I think the, the important piece here is when we think about how lakes like these are represented in say big global climate models, the things that are, you know, projecting a hundred years out, what's going to happen, these kinds of scenarios, the lakes are represented really poorly. Like historically, well, I don't know at the start, they weren't at all included on that map. It was like continents and ocean.

And then they started adding lakes and they were like these little blocks, you know, so maybe superior was two blocks and everything else was one block. And they actually, this is like a historical tidbit. They assigned the temperatures of the lakes by averaging the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific ocean.

[Stuart Carlton]
Oh, cause it's right in the middle. Yeah.

[Eric Anderson]
So, you know, that worked well.

Now they've improved since that, but not by an outstanding amount, I would say there's still room to grow there. But all that said, I think the way that we even model these lakes and we're like modelers and like lovers and we're trying to do our best is that ice, like the way that the models work is like the, you cut off the evaporation proportionally to how much ice there is. So like in a, in a spot in the lake, let's say, you know, the size of your, your desk or something, if you say that chunk is 50% covered, then I'm going to, the model is going to say, okay, we'll reduce the evaporation by 50% in that chunk.

And if it grows to a hundred percent, reduce it by a hundred percent. And that's fine. If you then have a chunk next door, that's open water and you're resolving that at the right scales and stuff, these climate models, because they're global and therefore they don't have real fine scale resolution and stuff.

Again, these lakes are poorly represented. They are using these kinds of fractional approaches that say, okay, well, superior is at 50% ice cover, then reduce the evaporation in the atmosphere by 50%. And we're, that just, I think is the problem.

That kind of simple kind of proportional math just doesn't capture it. So if we want to get kind of the climate scenario, the climate story, you know, modeled accurately, we'd need to represent these lakes better. And that kind of simple ice math, I think is, is the piece that needs refined.

[Stuart Carlton]
That's a really great example, but it doesn't mean that before, well, there's that very famous saying, um, multiply attributed, but I think it's, it's an important one, which is that all models are wrong. Some models are useful, right? And, and I think what I remember you talking with us before is one cool thing about modeling is it forces you to really think about, uh, what affects the system?

What assumptions you make, what information you have and don't have, and how do those relate? And in creating those models, that becomes pretty dang useful. But so while at first that was a good first run, maybe, maybe not that good of a first run to average the Atlantic and Pacific now as science advances, as computing power advances, as our understanding of statistical, uh, inference advances, um, you can get a lot more accurate.

And so, yes, the model is probably still wrong in the sense that it's not super precise going to predict what it's going to be like. It starts to become really even more useful, right? And so then you can have more useful information into additional useful models to help explain, uh, where we're headed and long-term.

I think that really helps. Uh, I think there's a policy story there too. Yeah, absolutely.

Excellent. Well, it is time for our game. This is so exciting.

We don't need game theme music. I realized the only game theme music we have is the wheel of Eerie, um, which is not super relevant. I'll be honest.

Uh, so we're not going to play the wheel of Eerie, but we are going to play overrated or underrated. All right. So we're going to present some things here and then you are going to tell us, and then a sentence why it'd be super boring if you just gave us a word, uh, overrated or underrated.

And if you want to, um, say a properly rated, that's fine. Uh, I'm a survey researcher. And so there's always a big debate to include a neutral point or do you force people to choose?

I don't want to force you to do anything, Eric. So if you want to, all right, uh, like lover, why don't you kick us off?

[Megan Gunn]
So modeling as a way to understand the world around us.

[Stuart Carlton]
Is that overrated or underrated or improperly rated?

[Eric Anderson]
I'm going to say underrated. Um, and I, this is why I think there's a, a saying that I think is originally Einstein that's been adapted for, I think the modeling world, which is everybody believes in observation except for the person who made it. And nobody believes a model except for the person who made it.

And I think that's kind of the, the gist that I get is that these models are kind of viewed oftentimes as these, these black boxes that you don't know what happens inside. And so, you know, what's going on with, with these things. And I think often, at least from the modeling side, I know all the bad parts about it.

Right. And so you're trying to avoid those and use it for something useful. And I think, um, they can do a lot more cool things than, than we give them credit for.

If you're careful, right.

[Natty Morrison]
Excellent.

[Megan Gunn]
Awesome.

[Natty Morrison]
Next up lake ice, like ice overrated, underrated.

[Eric Anderson]
Oh man. Okay.

So I'm going to go at odds with this paper and say it's underrated.

[Stuart Carlton]
Whoa! Underrated.

[Eric Anderson]
The reason for that is I think, um, it's really complicated. So, you know, we're, we've been trying to model lake ice for a long time and people before everything I do is just build on people that came for decades before working and doing things. And it's just, it's one of the more complicated parts of the lake.

It's tough to get right. It's, it's wild out there. It's not like an Arctic ice sheet.

It's, it's all like the marginalized zone. It's all this crunching, smashing, moving stuff that is, um, I think how cool it is and how difficult it is. I think that's underrated.

[Natty Morrison]
Absolutely love it.

[Stuart Carlton]
Love it. Plus there's a huge cultural story with lake ice, which I didn't appreciate because we don't get any lake ice on our little neck of Lake Michigan, or if we do, it's bad news. Has Lake Michigan ever had no, nowhere near a hundred percent cover.

92 is the highest I see in that data set. Anyway, but, uh, there's a huge cultural story with lake ice.

[Natty Morrison]
Whenever I see a hundred percent, I always assume that that's like, not true. Like, I just realized that

[Stuart Carlton]
It was somebody who's like, You're making that observation.

[Natty Morrison]
Well, yeah. Cause they're like, it's a hundred percent reliable or it's a hundred percent accurate.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah.

[Natty Morrison]
Like, or like when I see a product, they're like, it's a hundred percent sustainable. I'm like, is it?

[Stuart Carlton]
You have to have room for error.

[Natty Morrison]
One hundred percent OPSEC, whatever. Like you just, I checked all of it. It's one hundred percent.

[Stuart Carlton]
Every percent has been checked. All right. Here's one.

You mentioned, uh, you mentioned, um, Bayesian statistics. This got me thinking. What about the concept of statistical significance?

[Eric Anderson]
I am not an expert, but I have a strong opinion on this.

[Stuart Carlton]
That's what we're going for. I love it.

[Eric Anderson]
Um, years ago we published a paper and we, um, call a coauthor on that paper said the American society of statistics no longer is talking about significance do away with it. And I'm paraphrasing of, I'm sure I'm doing a bad job.

And so we didn't put it in that paper and the reviewers were like, you better calculate significance. What are you doing? And we threw these like recommendations back at them from the statistical society and got that paper through LSA.

Um, so I'm going to say it's overrated, uh, with very little knowledge about the subject.

[Stuart Carlton]
Fair enough.

[Natty Morrison]
It's also, it's an unfortunate acronym for the American society of statistics. I mean, right. Yeah.

Like what is the likelihood of them not realizing that 100% they're a hundred percent now they must. They're yeah, for sure.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. No, I'm a big, uh, confidence interval point estimate conference, confidence interval guy, but it often is a, is a big fight there. But yeah.

Well, the other problem is nobody knows what a P value is. Um, and yeah, I think, I mean, I won't ask you Eric, but yeah, if you ask your average faculty member, many of them would not, uh, define P value, uh, appropriately. Um, cause it turns out it's a weird specific definition.

Anyway, bring us home. Lake lover. Last one.

[Megan Gunn]
So since you work at the Colorado school of mines, underrated, overrated, or neutral cryptocurrency mining.

[Eric Anderson]
Um, okay. I know not much about what any of that means.

[Stuart Carlton]
You're at the Colorado school of mines, man.

Don't think I figured that's most of what y'all do.

[Eric Anderson]
I'm going to say that it is overrated and I don't know if this applies, but just because I don't think we should be even dealing with that.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
Okay. We don't need you to go into detail.

Fair enough. I was trying to come up. I wanted to come up with some big mind safety thing.

And I was like, I don't even know enough about the only mining I know is, and it sounds like Eric and I know the same amount about it. One of Eric, no, this is great. We really appreciate you coming on and telling us about this paper, which again, if I were your agent would say is revolutionizing.

No, I wouldn't. I would say it's revolutionizing the way that we conceive of large lakes and one of their most critical processes, which is the lake levels and the way the lake ice affects them. And it's interesting to hear the approach you took.

And I love the work that you do and that Drew does. And you're all both great guests and all of that, but that's actually not why we invited you here and teach me about the great lakes this week. The reason we invited you and teach me about the great lakes is to ask you two questions.

The first of which is this, and we can look for precision with you since you have answered before. If you could have, choose to have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which one would you choose?

[Eric Anderson]
So I think before I said sandwich and I'm sticking with sandwich.

[Stuart Carlton]
Sticking with sandwich. Love it. Oh, this is good.

But you have moved since our last time you were in, were you in Ann Arbor? You were in Ann Arbor. You probably said Zingerman's because they all do.

And that's fine. No problem. But now you're in Golden, Colorado.

I'm going to go get myself a Coors banquet beer and I'm going to carry it into a restaurant and I'm going to drink it with a delicious lunchtime sandwich. Where should I go to do this?

[Eric Anderson]
So I would suggest Just Bee Kitchen.

[Stuart Carlton]
Just Bee Kitchen.

[Eric Anderson]
Which has some kind of buffalo-y chicken wrap of sorts that they call the Riot Wrap, which is delicious.

So if wraps work in a sandwich, that's what I'm going with.

[Natty Morrison]
I would say yes, it is.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're not doing that here.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah. Sounds good. Speaking of Golden, I lived in Colorado for two years and I lived in Superior and then Denver for another year.

And I didn't know that I was afraid of heights until I moved to Superior and went to Lookout Mountain in Golden.

[Eric Anderson]
Oh yeah.

[Natty Morrison]
And I got up there and I was like, wow, I am terrified of heights. And then had to drive back down the other side of it with all the hairpin turns with my sister driving who had just gotten her license in her twenties. And it was a terrifying experience.

And so I'll always remember Golden fondly for that reason.

[Eric Anderson]
Yeah, that's a harrowing drive. We've always remarked like the people who decide where they place guardrails are, the sharpest, steepest turn has nothing.

[Natty Morrison]
It is so, it is as though they are like, it's so scary that I would just like, just drive off the edge. Where it's going to happen. She would accelerate, break, turn, accelerate, break.

Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
I think they just put them in. I think they just put them in retroactively.

[Natty Morrison]
Someone goes over the side. They're actually in memoriam of everybody who's gone over there. It's like, oh, there's another one.

[Stuart Carlton]
Because the family has to spring a thousand bucks to pay for the guardrail.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah. It's made by the metal from the car. Sorry.

[Megan Gunn]
Well, we have gone to a weird place, but we want to know what is a special place for you in the great lakes that you'd like to share with our audience and what makes it special?

[Eric Anderson]
Okay. So last time I answered this, which is with a great spot, which I said, the Straits of Mackinac, which I still love, but it's only because I couldn't think of my real favorite place, which is maybe a ghost town. I don't know, but there's somewhere called Port Oneida, if I'm saying that right.

And it's on Lake Michigan, on the state of Michigan side, just North of the Sleeping Bear Dunes. If you drive up there, I think it's, it must have used to been a place. Cause there's like a building with a historical sign that I honestly never read, but you can park at that building and sneak down onto the beach, right in this beautiful, you know, isolated, you know, a nice sand beach overlooking Lake Michigan.

You can see South Minotiu Island from there. And so Port Oneida, which I probably just gave away that that exists and people are going to go and spot, but that's my favorite spot. Awesome.

[Stuart Carlton]
Eric Anderson, Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for the school work.

And thank you so much for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes.

[Eric Anderson]
Thank you. Glad to do it.

[Stuart Carlton]
Megan, the Lake Lover, what's something you learned about the Great Lakes this week?

[Megan Gunn]
I learned that Lake Superior has had near 100% ice cover. That Lake is so deep.

[Stuart Carlton]
It's so deep.

[Megan Gunn]
It just like, that just is blowing my mind.

[Stuart Carlton]
Because that, that water down there should act as a nice ballast.

[Megan Gunn]
Yeah. And how like, or like Erie being like fully covered, like that doesn't surprise me.

[Stuart Carlton]
I just didn't know that, yeah. Lake Superior, whoa. Well, you know what, we'll just have to have someone on to tell us how could that happen?

Yeah. How could that happen? Natty, what's something you learned about the Great Lakes this week?

[Natty Morrison]
I mean, I really, I learned what modeling is. And so I feel like really what I learned is the depth of knowledge and ingenuity of the minds who are thinking about these issues and like what they're capable of.

Like it is really remarkable to realize that they are able to put all this together and then, you know, what that could mean for future generations as they continue to monitor the Great Lakes and learn more about how that works as a, in a general global climate model. Yep.

[Stuart Carlton]
Really cool. The way that there's a lot of people with really high functioning, rigorous brains thinking through this stuff, right? In a very thoughtful way.

It's pretty awesome. Pretty awesome to talk about people like that. Maybe I'm usually just here for the fart jokes.

Teach me about the Great Lakes is brought to you by the fine people at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant, Illinois. And you bring the Illinois, Indiana's Sea Grant. We encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at IISeaGrant.org and at ILIMSeagrant on Facebook, the old blue ski and other social media, Insta. We're on Insta. We're on LinkedIn. I don't even know we're on LinkedIn.

That was my understanding.

[Natty Morrison]
Oh yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
You should follow us on LinkedIn.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, absolutely. Get that connection in there.

[Stuart Carlton]
Let's connect, baby.

[Megan Gunn]
Who would like to read the next one? Hmm Natty.

[Stuart Carlton]
Okay.

[Megan Gunn]
Why am I saying my name? That's what I have come to.

[Natty Morrison]
I just want to do it on beat. Our senior producer is Carolyn Foley and Teach Me About the Great Lakes is produced by Megan Lakelover-Gunn and Reni Miles. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and fixer and our coordinating producer is Ava Hale.

Our super fun podcast artwork is by Joel Davenport. The show is edited by Sandra Svoboda.

[Megan Gunn]
And if you have a question or comment about the show, please email it to teachmeaboutthegreatlakes at gmail.com or leave a message on our hotline at 765-496-IISG or 4474. So 765-496-4474. If you want to send us a postcard, we love postcards.

That's 195 Marcella Street in good old West Lafayette, Indiana. 47907.

[Stuart Carlton]
There it is. 47907. 47907. Anyway, thanks for listening.

Keep grading those lakes.