Could the Chesapeake Bay Freeze Over?

After writing my blog entry about the unusually cold Chesapeake Bay waters killing two million fish, and reading AccuWeather.com's stories about the coldest weather since 1985 coming, I asked myself: Could the Chesapeake Bay freeze over, and what problems might that cause?

Current water temperatures in the Bay are between 32 and 36 degrees, roughly, based on the point observations and analysis from NOAA NowCoast as you can see from the map above. We know this is far below normal for this time of year. There have already been some minor ice problems reported by boaters in the northern part of the bay.

So will it freeze over this year? If our forecast is correct, some additional ice could indeed form, but it should be nothing compared to past events. Read on for the details.

It turns out that the Bay has frozen at least seven times before, the most recent being 1977, which was a hard, bay-wide freeze. What really matters though is how have the temperatures compared between Dec. 76 - Jan. 77 and this season?

These graphs of the weather at Annapolis, Maryland from Dec. 1 to Jan. 31 tell the story.* Whether you look at highs and lows, or daily averages, this season pales in comparison. In fact the average period temperature* will be 30 degrees in 1977 but 33.5 this year, climatologically a long ways off.

And thank goodness - because you don't want the insanity that happened in '77. Here's a bullet point list pulled from the article referenced above:

- Shipping, a crucial economic sector for this area, essentially stopped - Ice floes swept away boats, piers and lighthouses - Much of Maryland and Virginia were declared federal disaster areas - The ice was a foot thick in the northern part of the bay, twice that in tributaries - A massive iceberg 100x40x20 feet was spotted just above the mouth of the Chester River- The Surry, Virginia nuclear power plant was forced to close when ice floes clogged its water intake - Over 5,000 idled seafood workers who couldn't fish lost money and got federal assistance - Boats couldn't supply oysters for weeks - Heating fuel ran low because tankers got stuck or ran aground - Remote residents were trapped for weeks - Ice built up in recreational boat cockpits that had to be removed via sledgehammers or chain saws - Boats were damaged by ice lifting pilings and piers - The coast guard used baseball bats and shotguns to break up the ice - After boats got stuck, helicopters had to deliver oil to those on Smith and Tangier Islands

Can you imagine the media hype if a huge iceberg was spotted there, which is just east of Washington, D.C.?

More information about the 1977 freeze on the East Coast in general can be obtained from an article in Time Magazine 1977 (which was also their cover story -- and they had a story on Global Cooling in 1972).

*1976-77 data from NCDC (Annapolis Police Barracks). 2010-22 data from AccuWeather.com Pro Past Weather (Annapolis, MD). Data between Jan. 8 & Jan. 22, 2010 from AccuWeather.com forecast for Annapolis, MD. Averages were for Dec. 1 to Jan. 22 for both numbers because no data was available for 2011 beyond that.