I really want to post some links to Marine Weather observations on Lake Superior. (See the end of this blog post).  I couldn’t find the Lake Superior buoy readings this spring. Then I noticed in red letters on the National Weather Service link, Maps had been changed to map.  I made a change, one lower case letter in the URL, and I got what I needed.

What happened this week  in my wide community on the North Shore of Lake Superior pales in comparison to events in Joplin, Oklahoma City, and Minot.

Our tornado happened Memorial Day Weekend.  You have to zoom in on a Google Map to find Brimson, MN, in the wilderness north of Two Harbors.  An F-zero strength tornado stayed on the ground for about three miles, and was about a quarter mile wide. One like it hit North Minneapolis in May, and that was a major disaster.  I don’t like to see our forest turned to toothpicks either.  Our tornado went aloft, and the funnel was seen by eSpotters for another eighteen miles.  It stayed on an eastward line aimed right for Little Marais.  I followed the cell on radar until it died over Lake Superior.

We got warnings via the Internet, but I wouldn’t have thought to turn on the Marine radio to get the details.  I use My-Cast radar images to get details.  There are no tornado sirens in the wilderness.

Until this week, I measured only 1/4 inch of precipitation for the month of June.  The day of the solstice, (Tuesday, June 21, 12:16 PM CDT), a gale developed on Lake Superior.  Gale force (30+ mph), and storm force (50+ mph) winds blew all over Minnesota.  Heavy rain fell on Wednesday and Thursday. I measure just over 3 1/4 inches. Lake effect happens in June too. Up the Little Marais Road (Lake County Rd 6) at elevations along the Superior Ridge, 400 to 600 feet above Lake Superior, 4-5 inch rainfall measurements were common. Runoff flooded Highway 61 ditches and one lane of the highway for a couple of hundred feet west of the intersection with County Road 6.

A MNDOT (Minnesota Department of Transportation) construction zone,   beginning near the entrance to Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site, and for two miles west became nearly impassible. My wife was coming home at Noon from an annual women’s bike trip (Bayfield, WI this year) on Wednesday.  Mary, who was driving, was very upset after maneuvering around two miles of muddy potholes at 3 mph.  Vehicles hauling boat trailers, and larger semi-trailer rigs pulled over as soon as they found a wide enough shoulder beyond the construction zone, to fix the damage and adjust loads. Kim, another driver of the women’s group came through the same zone a few minutes later, and met an ambulance headed to a Duluth hospital, working its way through the mess.  Kim and several others called MNDOT to complain.

MNDOT’ posted advice to use Lake County Roads 3 and 4 as an alternate route.  County Road 3 starts just east of the Stewart River near the popular Betty’s Pies Restaurant.  That back way  adds about six miles to the drive to Silver Bay.  A left turn a couple of miles north of Beaver Bay takes you back to Highway 61.  It is a scenic drive in nice weather.  About ten miles of gravel road is not capable of sustaining heavy volumes of truck traffic.  Portions of that low lying gravel road are subject to flash flooding and washouts.  The Lake County Highway Department rushed in yesterday (Friday) to repair the damage.  A steady parade of  large haulers came came down the steep hill from gravel pits on Little Marais  Road to restore the  Highway 61 construction zone at Split Rock.  All that traffic diverted the back way while repairs were made.

I happened to be volunteering at the Silver Bay Public Library the hour of the solstice on Tuesday.  Eileen, the Assistant Librarian, got a call from her husband.  A maple tree blew down at their Lax Lake home, a popular summer destination about eight miles north of Silver Bay.  He called again a few minutes later to report a large spruce had fallen on Eileen’s parents’ driveway, also on Lax Lake, snapping a power line.  Electrical power was out over a large area.  We had power outages and power spikes squealing our backup power supplies for three more days.  The longest outage was only two hours on Tuesday night.

The Little Marais River gushed muddy water into Lake Superior. The good news, the lake level had been about a foot too low for my neighbor to put skids in the water from his boathouse.  Now it is possible to get out and go fishing.  The bad news, some seasonal residents pump filtered lake water for drinking; too muddy for filters to handle.  The mud takes only a day or so to settle to the bottom.

The surface temperature of Lake Superior is only about 38 degrees this June. It should be getting close to 50 degrees by the end of June.  I recorded an air temperature of  83 degrees yesterday afternoon.  Only four days this month has the temperature exceeded 70 degrees.  That is a cold June.

I put on my neon green Flippin t-shirt (from Flippin, Arkansas) to enjoy the warmth.  Another lake effect happened moments later.  The land breeze shifted to a lake breeze.  The temperature dropped to 60.  Actually, the temperature remained in the upper 60′s over night. Fireflies came out, my mythical midsummer fairies, only four days later than usual.  This morning the temperature dropped to 46 with the lake breeze by 10 AM.

Here are the promised links to Lake Superior Marine Weather observations.

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/maps/WestGL.shtml   The map.

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=slvm5  Silver Bay Marina

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=45027  Duluth UMD buoy

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=disw3  Devils Island, the Apostle Islands

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=45006  Mid-lake buoy Western Lake Superior

On October 25, 2010 I posted a blog entry in which I mentioned a major storm developing in Minnesota. I said it might rival the storm of November 9-10, 1975 that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald on the east end of Lake Superior.  In fact, this year’s storm lasted parts of three days.  It produced severe weather  that involved more than half of North America. 

The barometric pressure was one of the lowest ever recorded in the U.S.   For the record, adjustments had to be made;  28.21 inches was recorded at 5:13 pm at Bigfork in Itasca County, Minnesota.  At Little Marais on the North Shore of Lake Superior,  about 200 miles southeast of Big Fork, my low barometer reading was a couple of hours earlier, 28.35 inches.  I did not make adjustments. 

Several reports described the storm in terms of a hurricane.  At the time of these low barometer records, the wind was not that strong at Little Marais. It was like being near the eye of a hurricane.  That hour between 3 and 4 PM, the wind shifted from northeast gale force  to storm force southwest winds.   Large rolling waves from the northeast, wave heights 7-9 feet within 100 yards of shore, met steeper waves building from the southwest.  Northeast waves get an extra push from a prevailing northeast current along the north shore, which added to the chaotic choppiness.  Before the storm force winds reached shore, I could already see waves exceeding 12 feet high about two miles out.

Winds had been sustained at about 30 miles per hour with frequent gusts near 40 miles per hour.  By 5 PM, a large blue spruce tree had broken along the lakeside less than 100 feet from our boathouse/cabin, where my wife has her office.  The southwest winds were sustained at about 40 miles per hour with frequent gusts to 50 miles per hour until 2 AM.  I discovered two more fallen trees the next morning.

October 28, we were still experiencing gale force northwest winds until about 4 PM, after the storm center has passed far to the north.

Here’s a link to a report by the Minnesota State Climatology Office.  Within it is another link to a report by the National Weather Service Office in Duluth.  I also have been following stories posted on Facebook by Tom Skilling, WGN-TV Chicago.

MN Climatology Working Group Report

 

Summer ended at 10:09 PM, Wednesday, September 22, 2010.  Here are my weather observations for the season.

Extreme differences in rainfall amounts highlight my report.  Duluth recorded 3.71 inches above normal for the season. Grand Marais showed 1.95 inches below normal.  My reports show 3.11 inches above normal.

Grand Portage at the Canadian Border about 40 miles northeast of Grand Marais continues to experience serious drought.  My sister’s home at Lake Nebagemon, Wisconsin, about 40 miles inland from the south shore of Lake Superior, recorded nearly 17 inches of rain in June, while I recorded 5.68 inches.  I don’t have the official numbers for Wisconsin locations.

The storm track persisted all summer across northern Wisconsin.  Lakes flooded.  Crops were flattened by inches of hail.  Numerous reports came every week, of violent straight-line winds and small tornadoes.  My cousins farm 10 miles north of Amery, Wisconsin looked neglected when we visited on September 18, but that condition resulted of two mini-tornadoes and six inches of hail on the ground the week before.  Every commercial business in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, where we spent the weekend, had new roofing in progress.

Some of these storms made national headlines.   Owatonna, a city on I-35 south of Minneapolis, was one of many that suffered  a disaster after flooding rains on September 23.  More than 10 inches fell in one day.

Compare the data I collected on my own weather station with the summaries prepared weekly and monthly by the Minnesota State Climatology Office.  I send my daily observations online to that office.  The Grand Marais summary is most similar to my observations, but variations in the surface temperature of Lake Superior make a big difference.

Northeast MN regional summaries

Mean  Temp   Departure        Precip Departure

April

Little Marais               44.2                 5.2               .89   -1.20
Duluth                          46.0                 7.0              .75     -1.34

Grand Marais             43.0                  4.6              .60      -.70

NorthEast                     44.9                 5.9              .86       -.78

May

Little Marais 50.8                  . 2             1.89       -.80

Duluth                          53.8               2.0             5.80       2.85

Grand Marais            48.0                  .9             1.97       -.53

NorthEast                   51.5                  .9             3.29          .60

June

Little Marais 57.4                  -.8               5.68       1.68

Duluth                      60.0                   .1               5.07         .82

Grand Marais         55.0                1.7               4.00        .59

NorthEast                58.0                 -.1               4.29        .29

July

Little Marais 67.5                3.5              4.00       -.10

Duluth                     69.1                3.6               3.45       -.75

Grand Marais        66.0                 5.4              3.33       -.05

NorthEast               67.1                 3.1              3.75       -.35

August

Little Marais 64.3                 1.0              5.05     1.42

Duluth                     68.2                 4.5              6.99    2.77

Grand Marais         62.2                 -.4              1.74    -1.39

NorthEast               65.8                 2.5              5.08     1.46

September thru end of summer

Little Marais 46.3               -8.1             2.11    -1.45

NorthEast                59.7               5.3                .84    -2.72

Maintaining a table format I couldn’t figure out.  Every time I click save, the columns misalign.

Here’s a link to the Minnesota Climate summaries.

http://climate.umn.edu/cawap/monsum/monsum.asp

Another link to Lake Superior Surface temperatures. Remember the headlines earlier this summer that the lake temperature was much warmer than normal?  That was May.  The temperature was about 50 degrees,  a month early.  The lake temperature took a nose dive when early gales began in mid-August.  Now the lake temperature is where it should be at the end of September, upper 40′s to mid-50′s, with variations day to day and around the lake

http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/stat/statistic?region=s&template=stat