Ice-In/Ice-Out Monitoring

The Program

The State of New Hampshire collects data on when our lakes and ponds experience Ice-In and Ice-Out. The Department of Environmental Services (D.E.S.) has data on some lakes going back over a century. In 2011 D.E.S. started to expand that data collection and now allows that data to be entered by local residents online. Clough Pond data goes back as far as 1969 and was added to their collection in January 2016. 

As D.E.S. has said:

"Tracking both ice-in and ice-out allows the determination of total ice cover days which is another important part of tracking physical, chemical and biological changes to lakes over time. With the erratic weather conditions experienced in recent years, the information can also help track climatological shifts and trends." 

Anybody with their own collection of Ice-In/Ice-Out dates for Clough Pond is encourage to make their data available, either by submitting it online directly to D.E.S. or simply make it available to Tom Edwards, President of the Clough Pond Association and he will see to it that the data is entered into the state database. We display it here on this page of our website as well if provided to us. Kathy Shields provided the ice-out dates as record by her mother Katherine F. Bogle. If anybody has the missing data or even different dates than listed please help us complete the table below. 

The state recognizes that each lake or pond (individual keeping the record?) may have used varying rules for how they determined the date when the water body transitioned between frozen and not frozen and vice versa. They accept whatever definition has been used in the past. For Clough Pond, unlike say Winnipesaukee, there is not much leeway for determining whether the pond was still frozen over or not. So, whatever data anybody may have on Clough Pond would be relatively consistent across years and very desirable to be in the database. Kathy uses the rule: If Mike can row his skull from their place to the boat ramp and back around the buoy markers then it is ice-out. Yes, there might still be some ice along the southern shore in the shade but as a measure of ice-out navigability rules. 

Kathy Shields is currently our monitor and recorder of all things ice. 

The Data for Clough Pond