NOAA Ice Predictions

So I'm curious to see if anyone has ever used weather or NOAA data to try and predict when ice will form? I work for the USCG and we use a system of Freezing Degree Days to predict how much ice will form on the great lakes.

Each day they weather service records the average temperature for an area and each degree that it is less than freezing is one freezing degree day (FDD). So if it's 15 F then it counts as 17 FDD's. They're cumulative, so after a few weeks of freezing temps you'll have several hundre FDD's.

It's not an exact science but we have benchmarks where the lakes freeze, like 250/500/1000 FDD's all mean different amounts of ice growth. Does anyone think this would be helpful in predicting ice growth? I know that it doesn't take into account things like sun/shade, but I'm thinking that each climb will probably form after so many FDD's.

Here's where the weather service stores the data. First column is the date, second column is the FDD's, and the third is the average temperature. They have data for almost everywhere in the US.

Cleveland (as an example):
webcam.erdc.dren.mil/AFDD/O…

General Link:
webcam.erdc.dren.mil/AFDD/

related story came by the other day - a citizen weather reporter has kept data for lake ice on his lake in Mn and he reported ice forming/freeze half day later each year over last 30 years. Less ice lasting fewer days over last 30 ...

There is much research on this topic. Some examples:
bergfuehrer.at/deutsch/publ…
igsoc.org:8080/journal/56/1…
igsoc.org:8080/journal/57/2…

In a sense I like that concept, but I think you are over-simplifying a bit too much: in addition to temperature history, the history of precipitation, humidity, and cloud coverage ought to be as important, if not more. All experienced ice climbers know that the amount of rain received in the September-November period can make or break an ice season, just as much as a warm spell in January can...

Also think about how neighboring routes in a single area can be in very different conditions at any one time (the Skylight area near Ouray is a good example); this clearly points to the fact that temperature history alone (all these routes experience the same raw temperature history) is far from sufficient to estimate route condition. The difference is likely mostly a matter of supply flow rate, which itself would depend on precipitation and sun exposure history in the basins that feed the route, and of course direct sun exposure of the route itself. Seems hard to imagine that -even today- we are collecting enough local info about such things (sun exposure in particular).

What would also make this approach tricky is that the baseline may need to be different for each route (not just each area), so arriving at any kind of "calibration" would likely take years of data accumulation (climate data discussed above + observations of route condition, which are hard to come by and not very objective even when they are).