Click the graphics twice to enlarge.  The month of October (which was the 2nd wettest in Grand  Rapids) was the 3rd  coldest for the U.S. since records began in 1895.  The only state with temperatures that were warmer than normal was Florida.  The second graph shows October temperature for the U.S. since 1895.  Side Note:   Carbon Dioxide has been increasing steadily since the 1940s.  If CO2 was the primary or a primary driver of temperature, what would you expect the graph to show for temperatures over the past 70 years?  Final note:  Some severe weather in Australia…golfball-sized hail and lightning caused a roof to cave in (minor injuries) near Brisbane.

<–Aniyah Randall has found the Great Pumpkins! (from POSTED).  It should be a warm weekend, with highs a good 10 degrees warmer than average.  A north-south band of clouds (see visible satellite in daytime, infrared at night) was smack dab over West Michigan for much of Friday (bad timing).  We did see a little sun in the late afternoon, esp. southwest of G.R.  I did say last night that the most sun would be in Berrien Co. and that’s been about the only spot that’s had a lot of sun today.  Temperatures were about 5 deg. warmer from Holland south along the lake Friday afternoon.  Readings were in the mid 60s south of Chicago – low 70s as close as Springfield, IL.   We’re going to be in an overall dry and mild pattern through next week.  I don’t see any real cold air here for the next 10 days and maybe not until after Thanksgiving.  There is a lot of cold air in northern Canada.  In fact – Thompson, Manitoba was -13 Thursday morning and they are only about 150 miles north of Lake Winnipeg.  Churchill, Manitoba hasn’t been warmer than 18 this week (which is 8 deg. below normal so far).  Alert’s average temperature this week is at -8.2F with a low of -26F.   There is a fair amount of snow cover in northern Canada and ice is already starting to form in Hudson Bay.  Moosinee at the south end of James Bay was +10 Friday morning (it was 18 in Big Rapids, 15 at Leota which is just north of Mt. Pleasant and I had ice on my birdbaths Friday AM).  the cold air is biding it’s time and when it breaks loose, we’ll be in for an extended stretch of cold weather and lake-effect snow.  Siberia is REALLY cold.  Verkoyansk had a HIGH of -38 Thursday.  There is a MONSTER low in the Gulf of Alaska…waves to 35 feet at one buoy with winds as high as 60 knots (69 mph).   Tropical Storm Ida is brushing Nicaragua and then the Yucatan and bring some heavy rain to Louisiana early next week.

<–After the Blizzard of ‘78 (Dude, where’s my car??!!). Here’s how I began last year’s winter forecast: “One of the best winter forecasts ever made was recorded by Laura Ingalls Wilder (in “The Long Winter“) while her family was homesteading in the fall of 1880 near what is now DeSmet, South Dakota. While the settlers gathered at the general store, a dignified, old Native American comes to warn the settlers about the coming “heap, big snows – for 7 (full) moons”. Most of the settlers heeded the warning and moved to town for the winter. Just as predicted, the blizzards came from late October to early April. This winter West Michigan won’t see blizzards for 7 full moons…but we’re going to have plenty of cold and snow between late November and late March.”

That last sentence proved to be true. Only a monster thaw on the weekend after Christmas (the temperature hit 60° due to the “Cancun Connection”) prevented us from getting some “Blizzard of ‘78″ style snow piles that would have really added up because the temperature stayed below freezing for all but a few hours during January (which was nearly five degrees colder than average). Here’s the bulk of last year’s forecast which you can reread here:

“Having digested all of this and more, I think snowfall this winter (2008-09) over the area will be above normal, varying from 55-60 inches in Lansing area to 85 inches in Grand Rapids to 100 inches in the favorable lake-effect areas. Marquette in the Upper Peninsula should top 150” for the winter. I think it’ll be colder than average in December. Lake Michigan is a little warmer than average and the lake temperature will stop for a week or two around 39 degrees as the lake water “overturns”. This will set the stage for some significant lake-effect snow in late November into December. We have a 57% chance of a White Christmas in Grand Rapids. This year I think the chance of a White Christmas (snow on the ground) will be at least 75%. We will see a January thaw, but winter will drag on a little later into March, when temperatures may again be a little cooler than average. This will mean we’ll have to spend a fair amount of money on plowing, sanding and salting. That will be a concern as the winter drags on during these financially lean times. So, don’t be afraid to get the season ski pass, get the snowmobile or cross country skies ready or find the ice fishing equipment. Winter is definitely on the way! This pattern will mean only brief incursions of cool air to central and southern Florida, so if you want to escape the cold, that would be a nice place to be.”

Let’s see how I did:   I got the above normal snowfall right. I wasn’t quite high enough on the totals, but I don’t think I’d ever forecast +100″ in  a mid-fall forecast. We did get some heavy lake-effect snow from late November into early December. Holland had 67″ of snowfall before Christmas Eve (sometimes they don’t get that much in any entire winter), including over 3 feet of snow from Nov. 16 to Dec. 9. We did get the White Christmas. We didn’t get a January thaw, but we did get monster thaws on the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s and also on Feb. 10-11. So the idea of a thaw was correct, but I missed the timing. The first week of March was cold (as cold as 5 above), but the weather story in March was +70% sunshine. The weather turned chilly again in early April (just in time for spring break) with below average temps. from April 4-14.   BTW, Tampa FL. was 0.6° warmer than average for Dec. thru Feb.  The cold air never really got down to south Florida.

There is so much to study when making up a winter forecast. I look at the prevailing upper level winds, world sea-surface temperatures, the cold that builds up by mid-Autumn in the Arctic, sunspot cycles, the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific Decadal Oscillations, 2009 Atlantic hurricane patterns (a very wimpy year for tropical storms), the number of 90-degree days we’ve had during the previous summer (7 in the last 2 summers combined, average is 9.5 for one summer), and the current state of La Nina/El Nino. We look back through our weather history to find correlations to the current conditions around the northern hemisphere and years when similar conditions were prevalent in the fall. Any forecast is a guess, an “educated guess”. The data base and the computer models aren’t good enough for near perfect forecast (won’t be in my lifetime), but long range forecasting has improved with new technology over the past 30 years, especially with weather satellites. (more…)

<–Bill Steffen and Craig James in 1975.  Thirty-five years ago today, I did my first television show in Grand Rapids.  I worked 6 days a week and made $175 a week or $9,100 a year.  My father sold me a car for a buck, which was about 50% of actual value.  We had the tan blazers that the “Eyewitness News Team” wore every night.  Notice us wearing the little balloon stickers from the “Eyewitness Balloon” (wonder if pilot Doug Mills is still out there?).  I was 23 with hair over my ears (ah…the 70s).  I had come from the Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison, where I was living in a sorority house with 53 girls (It was legal.  I was the houseboy at Delta Gamma).  This was my first TV job.  I had done a little sports on the radio on WNTH-FM in Winnetka, Illinois when I was in high school (I had this nice deep bass voice that sounded good on FM.  I had to read a long list of football scores and I remember looking in the dictionary to discover new verbs for what one team could do to another).  I had received a B.S. in Meteorology and Physical Geography while in Madison.  We had two large maps for TV…the state map and the national map.  We wrote on them with markers, and had a spray bottle and paper towels to clean them.  The forecast was just tomorrow and the next day.  Craig and I hand plotted surface maps several times a day and analyzed them with different color pencils (some were real works of art!).  The main news anchors were Cal Wierenga and Jim Rummel.  Henry Capogna (now sales manager for Clear Channel in G.R.) did sports.  I was on at Noon with News Director Jack Hogan (now a city councilman in Claremont, Florida) and Dick Richards, and I did radio on WZZM-FM…which had some decent numbers back then…not in Bruce Grant territory, but we did all right.   A high school kid named Rick Beckett had some air time back then…anyone remember…Bill Gamble or Lee DeYoung (or did he use the Dutch spelling, I don’t remember) or Dave Kent? (more…)

<–Live radar of W. Michigan.  Nothing more than a sprinkle in most areas today.  There is a small chance of a little stronger light shower or a few snow flakes, but this will all be very light.  So far a few sprinkles at Muskegon, .06″ up at Ludington.  There is a small trough in easterm Wisconsin that will keep the clouds around tonight into tomorrow AM.  Thursday night we’ll get below freezing before a little mild air comes in on Friday.  It will be a little breezy Friday PM, but at least it’ll be dry for the Friday night high school football playoffs.  Saturday we could catch a light shower.  It’ll be an overall milder pattern with high in the 50s to near 60 from Friday thru early next week.  No big storms on the horizon now.   I’m working on the winter forecast this AM.  Here’s GRR NWS radar, GRR storm total rainfall, Great Lakes radar Storm Total Rainfall, latest surface observations, a surface weather map, GRR NWS discussion, Visible Satellite loop (daytime), Infrared Satellite Loop (night), Here’s Milwaukee NWS radar and Chicago radar, Chicago storm total rainfall, the Spyglass Weather Station (Holland Channel) and the Muskegon GLERL weather station. Gale Warnings for Lake Michigan.

He may be the most famous storm chaser in the history of mankind – Grand Rapids own Reed Timmer will be migrating south in December to do some amazing atmospheric adrenalin-pumping storm chasing in Argentina. It’s springtime in South America and they’ve had several severe weather outbreaks.  Here’s pictures of Reed.   If you’re interested in S. American Weather, check out the METSUL site (try using google translator).

Click here to see full screen. This is a satellite map of the large area of snowcover over China. The high temperature the past two days in Beijing has been 20 deg. cooler than average. The Chinese have taken credit for the snow after seeding the clouds with silver iodide. While that may have had a local effect, it certainly didn’t produce this much snow.  Check out this video of Chinese Army snow brushers and ground seeding.  While I’ve been dropping hints and sharing a little information on the winter forecast for several months now, one aspect of this winter may be the set up of long-range troughs over fairly densely populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere (China. Eastern U.S. Eastern Europe).  Farther north in Siberia, temperatures have nosedived.  On Nov. 1, Verkoyansk had a high/low of -28/-35.  To the south, Typhoon Mirinae has taken at least 42 lives in Vietnam.

While Grand Rapids didn’t get any measurable snow in October, it was a different story in parts of the Plains.  North Platte, Nebraska had 30.3” of snow in October.  That was not only the snowiest October ever, but it also ranks as the snowiest month ever recorded at North Platte, besting March of 1912 (records go back 135 years)!   The 30.3” is more snow than they normally get during the entire winter!  On the morning of the 30^th, observers reported snow drifts of 3-4 feet near North Platte.  Plows pushed the piles up to 6 feet high in the downtown area.  The average high temperature in North Platte was 13.8° cooler than average in October.  They had only two days when the temperature was warmer than average and 23 of 31 mornings were at or below freezing. (picture from Curtis, NE. from Dean Cosgrove of www.chasetours.com)

Girl Scouts and Cast of the First Annual Event

Happy November Everyone!  In this age of blogging, I thought it was time to try my hand at it.  My main goal will be to share important events, interesting weather information, and other tidbits that come along, which you may enjoy.  Now, the only question is where to start?

I know!  Last Thursday evening, an exciting event took place at the Wealthy Theatre, on behalf of the Girl Scouts, called “That’s Entertainment!”!  It was the first time an event such as this has taken place in West Michigan, but from the result, it certainly won’t be the last.  Through this combined network event, thousands of dollars were raised for the Girl Scouts of Michigan Shore to Shore, and, as a bonus, local media personalities got to show off their talents!

The evening was a jam-packed full of dancing, singing, laughing and tons of fun.  Brian Sterling, Dee Morrison, and I, along with others, took part in an opening dance, choreographed to “All that Jazz”, from the musical Chicago…complete with a top-hat!  After a stunning finale, the individual acts took off.  They included juggling, lip syncing, and even a rap number!  Brian Sterling had the entire theatre smiling from ear to ear with his comics.  To make it even better, Terri DeBoer gave him a glowing introduction and then showed off with a little baton twirling (she is really good).  While manning the flip cam, I prepared for my turn on stage.  Hula Dancing, how about that for a talent?  Surprised?  Yeah, so was I.  As a last minute fill-in, I learned the short dance in about 30 minutes.  Not perfect, but tons of fun, and definitely a great leg workout!

The night finished with the song “This One’s for the Girls”, an amazingly fitting way to end a fabulous night.

Big thanks go out to all who made it possible; everything from booking the theatre, arranging the food, tickets, talent, choreographers….Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.  It is so true that hard work does pay off.  Now I’m thinking, “Can’t wait till next year.”  Better yet, I think I already have my talent picked…but I’m not telling:-)

Full moon near Ionia from Brenda Wieczorek on POSTED.   Sunday evening around sunset I watched a flock of geese flying south pass right by the full moon.   The exact time of the full moon is 2:14 PM today (Monday, Nov. 2).  This full moon is called either the Beaver Moon or the Hunter’s Moon.  Tonight the moon is 236227 miles away from the Earth. The moon will be right next to the Pleiades (Seven Sisters) Tuesday evening.  Saturn is visible in the east-southeast in the morning.   Venus is sinking lower in the sky, but still visible closer to the horizon before sunrise.  Jupiter shines brightly to the south in the early evening moving to the low west-southwest in late evening.  The sun is now sunspot-free again, as it has been 77% of 2009.  With the time change, sunrise for Monday was 7:19 am and sunset at 5:33 PM.  The sun is highest in the sky at 12:26 PM when it will be 32.1 degrees above the southern horizon.  At the Winter Solstice, the sun will be only 23.6 degrees above the southern horizon at solar noon.  The best view (flyover) of the International Space Station for West Michigan will be Weds. Nov. 11 at 5:47 PM, when it will be visible for almost five minutes.