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Python Package for Analysis Ready Lake Mendota Ice Phenology Data

How to start analyzing/visualizing a 150-year ice record

Lake Mendota ice phenology data. Solid black markers in the duration plot indicate years where the lake froze and thawed twice in a single season. (image by author)

In this quick pos I will present mendotapy, a Python package to read analysis-ready Lake Mendota ice phenology data into memory. This ice phenology dataset is maintained by the Wisconsin State Climatology office.

Get the data

mendotapy source code is available on GitHub.

Install the package via pip

pip install mendotapy

Import the package and load the data as an analysis-ready Pandas dataFrame

import mendotapy
df = mendotapy.load()

dataFrame containing analysis-read data (image by author)

Data Columns

• season: the winter season
• iceon_date: first date majority of the lake surface is estimated to be frozen
• iceoff_date: latest date of ice breakup
• duration: number of days the lake remained frozen during the season
• n_freezes: number of freeze/breakup cycles during the season