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IMO the amount of ice and snow cover on the pond has a lot to do with amount of aeration needed between Dec and Mar-Apr. Generally in most but not all "normal" ponds, the thicker the ice and longer snow lies on the ice the more the need for aeration. Years ago I and esshup experimented with winter aeration. He still winter aerates and I do not. I remove snow to about 10%-15% of the iced pond to expose the ice and underlying water to sunshine which allows the phytoplankton to make DO. When snow cover lies on the ice longer than 6 weeks without snow melt off I get nervous. Then I check DO levels and sometimes will start the aerator to melt a hole in the ice to allow degassing and light penetration for the phytoplankton.
In my pond I get water flowing through the porous sandy soil that the pond is dug in and when compared to the local lake that is roughly 1.5 miles away I seem to always have about half the ice thickness that is on the lake. When I take water temps in my pond, they are consistently 2-3 degrees higher than the water that is in the lake. I think that is the reason for the thinner ice on my pond. I am in a Lake Effect snow belt, so if I have 1"-2" ice on the pond and a Lake Effect storm comes through, the snow piles up on the ice and turns the ice white before I can safely get out there to clean the snow off. That's the main reason why I run the winter aeration system.
A customer had a 2 year old pond (it was only stocked at 1/2 the recommended stocking rate when new) and he had a windmill aeration system. It was set up so the deep diffuser was shut off during the winter and the one in shallow water was turned on. He had a fish kill when we had a 2 week span in February of no wind, heavy fog with about 3" ice and 6" snow on the pond. The other ponds of his did NOT have a winterkill, but they were aerated with a grid based system.
