First ice-out reports coming in for southern Minnesota
Open lakes across southern Minnesota. Spoon Lake in the Twin Cities is ice-free.
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It’s a sure sign of spring. The ice is finally giving way on some lakes in southern Minnesota.
High-resolution satellite images and Minnesota DNR reports show many lakes are now ice-free across southern Minnesota.
Ice out on Sawn lake near Mankato came in Monday, April 4. That’s exactly average for the period of record starting in 1992 for Swan Lake. Several other lakes in southern Minnesota are ice-free.
Ice out was reported on Saturday, April 2, for Spoon Lake in the eastern Twin Cities.
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Twin Cities area lake ice softening
It’s been cool the past month. But the combination of our wet, windy weather pattern is starting to work on lake ice in the Twin Cities area. Many ponds are now ice-free around the Twin Cities. I took this photo of a liquid pond in Victoria Monday afternoon.
Here’s the west end of Lake Bavaria in Chaska Monday afternoon. You can see the darker ice near shore softening up. More solid (but unsafe) lake ice is still white on the right of this image.
With another round of rain and wind this week I expect more lakes to report ice-out in the coming days. With plenty of sunshine and warmer temperatures this weekend, we could see Minneapolis lakes like Harriet and Bde Maka Ska go ice-free by next weekend.
Larger Twin Cities lakes like Minnetonka and White Bear will follow. The median ice-out date for Lake Minnetonka is April 14.
