Last month marked the second warmest December on record in the Adirondacks, according to Paul Smith’s College natural science professor Curt Stager. 2015 was the first warmest December here. And 2023 was the second warmest year on record in the park, tied with 1998, with 2012 being the warmest.

It’s been bad news for winter lovers, snow sport venues and has had implications for the local economy.

Some cross-country ski areas had to close their trails, leading to lost revenue. Even ski resorts like Whiteface, with millions of state dollars invested in its snowmaking technology, have struggled to cover trails with the lack of winter chill. For those without snow machines, there have been few skiable days.

Snowmobilers are itching to rev up their motors and hit the recently open-for-winter Adirondack Rail Trail. Snowmobiling is economically important for towns like Tupper Lake. Some ice anglers too impatient to wait for the ice to thicken up could be seen hugging the shoreline of Lake Colby last week, cutting through only a couple inches of ice to drop lines.

From left, Emily Muncil, Jacob Adams and 2023 Winter Carnival King Marty Rowley shovel snow off the icy surface of Pontiac Bay on Lake Flower on Thursday, part of a dozen volunteers keeping the ice clear of snow to help it freeze better for the Winter Carnival Ice Palace. After a warm December, temperatures dropped, the ice is growing and the Ice Palace Workers 101 are tentatively planning to start construction in around two weeks. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Saranac Lakers are anxious if the ice will be thick enough for the Winter Carnival Ice Palace, but work has started to preserve the ice.

Whiteface Mountain Field Station Science Manager Scott McKim said this region may miss out on bulk of the predicted weekend storm but midweek might be good for snow. He measured two inches of snowfall on Thursday morning.

“A record amount of land area over North America was snow-free for December,” McKim said.

In December, only 13 days logged average temperatures below freezing in Saranac Lake, according to data from the Weather Underground. The mercury even closed in on 50 degrees on at least six days. The peaks and valleys of the fluctuating temperature make it an uphill battle for snow and ice growth, even with the temperature dropping below 10 on six days through the month.

There was also minimal snow accumulation in December, with whatever snow had built up through small events earlier in the month completely wiped out by torrential rain and flooding on Dec. 18.

McKim said determining what caused this delayed winter is a “tough nut to crack.” He said you could talk to 10 different climatologists and get eight different plausible answers. There’s even disagreement among local meteorologists, climatologists and scientists over the extent El Niño is impacting this winter.

But they are in agreement on the broad trend that recently, winter has not been what it used to be. They are trending shorter, starting later and cold is sometimes more inconsistent.

El Niño is a weather phenomenon when the Pacific Ocean surface warms, causing “trade winds” which typically blow east to west to weaken or reverse direction and blow west to east. This happens irregularly, with two to 10 years in between occurrences.

Ice Palace

When the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival Committee met on Tuesday at the Elks Lodge, Chairman Rob Russell went around the room to get updates on the many events during the festival from the people organizing them. They answered in traditional fashion — a call-and-response similar to a religious ritual. Russell would shout out an event, and the organizer would give a two-to-three-word response.

“Arctic Golf?” … “It’ll happen,” Martha Watts said.

“Blue Buns?” … “On track,” Bob Seidenstein said.

“Coronation?” … “We’re all set,” Kelly Morgan said.

“Ice Palace?” … Ice Palace Workers 101 Director Dean Baker stood up. “I don’t know if it’ll happen,” he said.

The room filled with laughter, but there was a bit of anxiety behind it.

Baker said they have ice. It’s not very thick but it’s getting thicker. Committee members said friends are constantly asking them if there will be an Ice Palace this year. They’re worried about it since the palace is a major part of Winter Carnival. In 1974, Lake Flower didn’t have enough ice to make a palace work, and the IPW made a palace out of snow instead. But other than that, they’ve always had some kind of a palace.

“Winter Carnival will happen regardless,” Russell said. “My feeling is that after all, Winter Carnival is a spirit which is alive and well in Saranac Lake. … It doesn’t matter how cold the thermometer is reading, how thick the ice is. How thick the palace is. It’s the spirit of carnival and it shall forever be in the community of Saranac Lake.”

Baker said he is aiming for a Jan. 17 start date for construction, but if the ice isn’t thick enough by then, they may need to push it back, delaying construction. This happened last year, which resulted in a slightly smaller palace, saved only through the dedication of the IPW volunteers.

“We’ve built ’em in six or seven days,” Baker said.

“If things don’t get better quick we may have to build a smaller version than what we designed,” he said on Tuesday. “And if it doesn’t get thick enough to even walk on, we’ll have to think of something else. What? I don’t know.”

But after a cold snap and snow on Wednesday, volunteers were out on the ice, shoveling and snowblowing off the snow to keep it from insulating the ice, letting it grow thicker.

The IPW volunteers harvest ice blocks from Pontiac Bay, which has still and shallow water which freezes while the rest of Lake Flower is still open water.

2016’s palace needed a lot of help to make it through the 10-day carnival.

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Skiing

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“It feels like I (skied) more in November than I did in December,” said Scott van Laer, the director of the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center.

By Dec. 27 all the snow had melted and there was no skiable terrain left at the center. All were bare or covered in ice. Van Laer said they only needed an inch or two of snow to open some trails, but they didn’t get enough to open them until Jan. 4.

“From running a business, that Christmas week with no skiing was killer,” van Laer said. “It really was just devastating. … When your business model’s made up around skiing it’s really tough when it doesn’t happen because there’s no snow.”

People still showed up to their Music over the Marsh concert series, but they’re antsy for outdoor activities, he said.

This is his third winter at the VIC. He said November is consistent for snow and marginal skiing around Thanksgiving but there’s typically been a thaw in December that the snow doesn’t make it through.

“But this year was the first time we were not skiing Christmas week,” van Laer said. “My last two winters at the VIC, it was lean. It wasn’t as good as I would have liked, but we were skiing.”

He said they are tending to get more snow in March on the other end of the season, but winter isn’t starting as early.

“There’s always some bad years but it does seem like winter is shortening and shifting,” van Laer said. “December has not been a reliable winter month like it used to be. … All the scientists will tell you winter is shrinking. There’s fewer cold days in the winter.”

Dewey Mountain Recreation Center Manager Jason Smith was brief in his quote on the slow start to the season for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing.

“You ready for my quote? Boooo!” he shouted over a phone call.

He said he’s done a lot over the years to improve the surfaces of the trails at Dewey to make them flatter and skiable with less snowpack. While it used to take eight inches of snow to get skiing, now, he is usually able to get some trails up and going with four inches of snow.

“But even that isn’t helping this year,” Smith said.

It has thrown a wench into the new Adirondack Tour de Ski cross-country ski race series, which has six events scheduled at Nordic ski venues around the region. The second race was supposed to be held at Dewey today, but because of the low snow, Smith had to reschedule it for Dec. 20.

The first race at Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid could only happen because they have snowmaking there, something no other venue in the region does. Next weekend’s race is at the James C. Frenette Sr. Recreational Trails in Tupper Lake and Smith said they are hoping for snow.

This warmth has also delayed the high school cross-country ski team’s practices there, delayed the start of a lot of local programming which should have started last week and lost revenue for the town-run ski mountain over the holidays. Smith said this is a key time for them to have good snowpack, and missing that during the holiday season makes the venue’s financials harder to manage.

“It’s tough. People come here to enjoy snow,” Smith said. “They eat and ski and snowmobile. But if it’s not here, they’re not coming.”

This is his 18th season at the mountain and the last time he remembers a slow start like this was in 2015.

Mount Pisgah has new pipes on the ski and snowboard mountain, allowing mountain Manager Andy Testo to produce more powder with the snowmaking guns, but he said the recent warmups have been challenging, because every time the temperature rises, they have to shut down the whole operation and bring in all the hoses to dry them out.

“It’s definitely a lot more work to do it inconsistently than to just keep things running,” Testo said.

Since he started making snow on Dec. 20, he had to shut down for a couple days around Christmas and again on Dec. 28. He restarted on Wednesday night but the forecast shows he might have to shut them off again.

This back-and-forth weather has produced some snow but it has been patchy.

Testo said he hopes to be open for skiing by the Martin Luther King Jr. Day long weekend from Jan. 13 to 15. This is a later start than usual. Usually the village-run mountain gets a couple days over Christmas break to invite skiers and snowboarders. Testo said he’s looking forward to getting some “free snow.”

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El Niño, climate change and 121 years of data

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There has been a “very active” sub-tropical jet in response to the El Niño episode, McKim said, but this has been waning and is almost back to a neutral phase. This jet created what he refers to as a “pineapple express” of heat and moisture from equatorial regions like Baja and Mexico to the Northeast. The Adirondacks has been missing the drainage of cold air from continental Canada it needs to really set up winter because this jet is pushing that cold air back north.

McKim said a polar vortex is currently confined to the North Pole and Asian side of the pole. The Adirondacks needs a lobe of that vortex to extend south to get the chill, but right now all the cold air is sequestered at the pole.

“There’s cold air around and it’s only a matter of time before that spills over the pole and we get it,” McKim said. “We’ll start to see some of the benefits — or if you don’t like winter, the bad parts. Winter weather. Let’s just say that.”

Meanwhile, he said China is seeing record cold, with Beijing recording its coldest December since records began in 1951, and Nordic countries have been seeing drastic sub-zero temperatures.

McKim said the region here is set up for a robust, active second half of winter, but he said he can’t be honestly certain about the future for this winter.

“I don’t mean to be a politician or a classic weatherman hedging his bets,” McKim said.

The weather is hard to predict because its so dynamic, he said. A storm predicted for next week was first picked up days ago in east Asia, but it still hasn’t come ashore in North American west, so as it travels over the Pacific Ocean there’s not a lot of data on it yet.

Stager said December 2023 was the second warmest December on record in the Adirondacks and 2023 marked the second warmest year for the Adirondacks on record. Globally, 2023 was the hottest on record.

“This El Niño began too late to have caused our mild winter of 2023, and short-term fluctuations like El Niño can distract us from the big picture,” Stager wrote.

McKim said the last three winters have had trouble getting going, even without an El Niño year.

El Niño is a natural cycle that has existed for centuries.

In October, a research paper published in the peer-reviewed “Geophysical Research Letters” points to the El Niño oscillation, which is typically impacted by things like solar output, oceanic circulation or volcanic eruptions, potentially having entered a new mean state of being more frequent and extreme in the 1970s as a direct consequence of human activity. This reasearch was conducted by studying mineral deposits in underground caves which showcase atmospheric conditions over the past 3,500 years.

“The main factor is long-term global warming due to our fossil fuel emissions, which has made record-breaking warm years and milder winters more common here and will continue to do so,” Stager wrote. “We see it most clearly in the shorter ice seasons on our lakes such as Lake Champlain, whose main basin rarely freezes any more.”

Brendan Wiltse, senior research scientist at Paul Smith’s College’s Adirondack Watershed Institute, said AWI data show this trend building for the past century.

“This is just a pattern that is a continuation of what we’ve seen in the long-term climate record for the region,” he said. “Both November and December are showing significant long-term trends of warming temperatures. This year, we certainly felt that.”

“Ice on is on average 17.8 days later than it was in 1903,” Wiltse wrote in an email. The total ice cover period is also 24 days shorter than it was then.

This year’s El Niño is producing globally higher temperatures than in the past few year. The last strong El Niño year was in the 2015-16 season. That year was the first year in AWI’s record keeping over more than a century that Mirror Lake didn’t freeze by the end of the calendar year.

This year, Mirror Lake froze on Dec. 22, which was later than normal, Wiltse said. In 2018, it froze on Dec. 23.

Since locals began tracking the ice on Mirror Lake in 1903, it has only taken this long to ice over three times — all since 1998. Up until 1984, it never took past Dec. 20 to ice over. Since then, this has happened six times. There is a gap in the ice data from 2005 to 2010 and 2013 to 2014.

The two shortest seasons for ice cover on Mirror Lake in the past century have occurred in the past two decades: 84 days in 2016 and 96 days in 2012. The average period for ice cover on Mirror Lake since 1903 is 140 days.

“It was Canada’s least snow-covered December of the past 58 years, while the lower 48 (states) and North America experienced their third least snow-covered December,” McKim wrote in an email, citing map data from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab.

McKim said December was a historic “outlier,” being much more “snowless” than typical, for the entire Northern Hemisphere. The Rutgers map shows the Tri-Lakes having a 5% departure of normal snow cover extent throughout December. The Northeast mostly saw a 25% to 75% departure of normal snow cover extent. And portions of the U.S. West and southwest Canada saw up to 100% departures of normal snow cover extent.

A plot graph from Rutgers depicting weekly snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere shows this part of the globe was mostly on track with a 57-year mean for snow cover extent per million square kilometers, with slightly higher than average snow cover in early November. In December, the numbers dropped significantly.

With the mercury in retrograde in the past few days, it appears winter is finally taking off.