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Old 02-18-2024, 10:01 AM
 
Location: Seattle
8,153 posts, read 8,194,306 times
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Article link here: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...or-its-future/

“Lake Washington is changing — by over half a degree Fahrenheit each recent decade. In fact, since 1963, the lake’s surface from June to September has warmed about 4.3 degrees, according to data collected and analyzed by King County and the University of Washington.

While some of the lake’s warming can be attributed to natural, long-term climate variations in the Pacific Ocean, global climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions is definitely playing a role in heating up the lake, said Curtis DeGasperi, a King County water quality engineer who manages the lake’s monitoring program. The lake has warmed up earlier in the year and taken longer to cool down in the fall and winter months, which have even shown a modest warming trend, DeGasperi said.

It’s not clear exactly what the warming trend will mean for the hundreds who flock to Lake Washington each summer for easy access to swimming and boating. Even with the region’s population growth, the lake has become cleaner. With wastewater infrastructure, the nutrients that feed algae, which can cause blooms and adverse conditions, have declined in the past two decades, bucking the trend seen in most urban waterways.

But warmer waters are decidedly harmful for endangered salmon that rely on cold, well-oxygenated water to survive, and Lake Washington has seen more days when its surface water has risen above what salmon can tolerate.

In each of the past 10 years the lake has experienced more than 40 days each summer when its surface has exceeded 68 degrees Fahrenheit. That can be compared with only three years of such warm temperatures between 1960 and 1980, according to an analysis by the county and University of Washington.

That surface water is what ends up flowing into the Ship Canal, which connects the lake to Puget Sound through the Ballard Locks, DeGasperi said. During the summer and fall months, that warm water in the roughly 30-foot-deep commercial and recreational passageway becomes a migration barrier for the adult and juvenile salmon trying to pass through — either vying for a chance to reproduce upstream or swimming toward their adult lives in the ocean”.
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Old 02-18-2024, 10:57 AM
 
Location: State of Transition
102,052 posts, read 106,836,948 times
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Thanks for posting this. I get the Times' daily newsbriefs, but they never provide access to the full articles. I saw this on their newsbrief page, but couldn't get the details.
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