Prospective students hear about fabled Wisconsin winters, where snow blows from every direction, ice coats the sidewalks of Bascom Hall and Lake Mendota freezes over. Once the lake has frozen, people from all over the community come together for Lily’s Classic.
The event, informally known as “Lily’s,” is an ice hockey tournament hosted yearly on the lake by the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity and has long been a tradition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The event is held to fundraise for Lily’s Fund for Epilepsy Research.
However, because of the changing climate, SAE canceled last year’s event scheduled for Feb. 19.
The ice was not thick enough to support the weight of the hockey tournament and its audience, normally drawing upwards of a thousand students, residents and donors, according to the Wisconsin Union.
This is one of the many changes in historical weather patterns that have been spurred by climate change. For instance, the summer of 2023 saw a drought, and this past summer, excessive rainfall was recorded. Climate experts have been monitoring the weather, collecting phenological data that help explain these changes and predict what may come next.
Since 1950, Madison has seen more rainfall on average than previously recorded. The summer of 2023 did not follow this trend because of El Niño, a cyclical climate trend occurring when the ocean surface is warmer than usual. This negatively affects winter in Wisconsin, making it warmer, wetter and decreasing snowpack — explaining why Lake Mendota didn’t freeze over last winter.
With El Niño ending, La Niña, its counterpart, will begin. La Niña occurs when the surface temperature of the ocean cools. During El Niño, winter in North America is typically drier, as witnessed last year, while during La Niña, the opposite is true. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Climate Prediction Center expects more precipitation than average this winter.
The increase in rainfall is just one aspect of Wisconsin’s new weather patterns that Dr. Michael Notaro, director for the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, predicts it will occur over the next few years. Notaro told the Cardinal that rainfall is expected to be more severe, while snowfall is expected to lessen. Temperatures are increasing in severity as well — winters are predicted to be colder and summers hotter.
“We are not expecting an El Niño event during the winter of 2024-2025, so that somewhat reduces the odds of an excessively low ice-covered winter and may be good news for the Lily’s Classic,” Notaro told The Daily Cardinal. “Of course, the long-term climate change signal for Lake Mendota has been a shrinking ice season, so canceled winter events are going to become increasingly more likely with each passing year.”
According to Dr. Notaro, it is likely Lily’s will be canceled again even without the help of El Niño, because global warming is affecting the climate in Madison more than ever.
