A river ice monitoring network in the north central United States

River ice jams cause over $100 million in damages annually in the United States. Efforts to forecast ice jams or to mitigate the problems caused by ice jams have often suffered from a lack of data. In response to this problem, a group of federal and state agencies are building a cooperative river ice monitoring network for rivers in the North Central United States. Observers collect river ice data and submit it to a central database which is accessible via the Internet. The Internet website supplies other information including river ice glossaries and photographs, descriptions of ice jam mitigation techniques, archived ice jam data, and plots of accumulated freezing degree days (AFDD) over time. Future activities will include the expansion of the network and the development of ice jam prediction models.