Laurentian Great Lakes Monthly Hydrodynamic and Ice-Thermal Model Dataset, 1941 to 2023

This dataset contains monthly mean output from a Finite Volume Community Ocean Model simulation of the Laurentian Great Lakes and Lake St. Clair. The model domain encompassed all five Laurentian Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan-Huron, Erie, and Ontario) and Lake St. Clair, with an average horizontal spatial resolution of 4.75 km and 21 sigma levels to capture boundary layer processes. The model did not include connecting channels, tributary flows, or groundwater fluxes. The simulation was run with FVCOM version 4.4.2. Ice dynamics were represented using the FVCOM ice model, based on the Los Alamos Sea Ice Model (CICE). Atmospheric forcing was taken from the ERA5 reanalysis product, which provides hourly atmospheric fields at approximately 31 km horizontal resolution. The original 3-hourly model output was resampled to a monthly mean in this dataset. The data is available from 1940 to 2023, but we recommend using only the data from 1941 to 2023, as the first year is used as a spin-up period for the model. Variables:- temp: water temperature- netheat: net surface heat flux- zeta: free-surface elevation- vice: sea ice volume/equivalent ice thickness variable from FVCOM-CICE output- tsfc: surface/ice temperature variable from FVCOM ice output- h: bathymetric depth- siglay: sigma-layer vertical coordinates- siglev: sigma-level vertical coordinates- area: horizontal grid area from FVCOM art1- x, y: model horizontal coordinates- lon, lat: longitude and latitude