It has been a long time since we have talked about something being above average other than the temperature.  The February of 2013 is changing that though.  Through February so far we have had 15″ of snow fall at the Rochester International Airport.  That was jump started by day after day after day of Clippers to start the month and then recently with the biggest snowstorm we have had in the last two winters.  Climatologically speaking,  February is the least snowy of the snowy months, but during the Winter of 12/13 it has been the snowiest.  Not only has it been the snowiest this Winter, we have actually cracked the top 10 snowiest for the month of February.  Here’s the list of five through ten.

In the coming days we will have a chance to climb up this list a little higher.  We are watching a large system that will feature the heaviest snow staying well to the south and east of our area, but come Tuesday and Wednesday, we will have a chance to be scraped by this system.

This is how the storm will look on Monday evening.  This system will likely bring a full blown Blizzard to parts of the plain states.  The track again will stay away from us, most likely putting Chicago in the bulls eye after slamming portions of Kansas and Missouri with over a foot of snow.  Our chances will be Tuesday and Wednesday and the intensity will be MUCH lighter.  With that said, a jog in the track northward would change things drastically so we are still monitoring the track of this one.

February has definitely brought active weather back to Minnesota.  Hopefully this stretch will continue to help replenish area streams and rivers.  The recent liquid will help somewhat to do that, but we need this active weather to continue into spring to help put a dent in the drought since the ground is still frozen.  Fingers crossed, but definitely a positive sign going forward!

Posted under climate, Drought, history, minnesota, Records, weather, winter, winter weather

This is a reminder that it is December, but other than the calendar and the Christmas music, there is very little to remind us of that.  December 3rd featured the 4th record high temperature that has fallen in the last three weeks or so.  What make this record more impressive in my opinion is the fact that we got into the upper 50s and low 60s without the help of sunshine.  Just think if we had a little bit of that to go around Monday afternoon where we would have ended up.  Here is an area wide look at the unseasonably warm temperatures we felt on Monday.

High temperatures Monday afternoon

While it was unseasonably warm, records weren’t broken everywhere.  Here’s a list of some who did.

List of a few area records broken Monday

There was initially an error with the temperature report in Rochester.  The official temperature made it 62, which still beats the record.

Posted under history, Records, Rochester

That was a pretty wild ride this past weekend. Rochester’s high temperature on Saturday the 10th was 75 degrees, which crushed the old record of 68, set back in 1949. In the books for Sunday the 11th is a high of 66 degrees which, remarkably, ties the record high set last in 1912. Sunday’s high temperature happened at Midnight and the low temperature was recorded just before Midnight Monday as the temperature at the Rochester Airport went down with every hourly reading. That’s an impressive drop in temperature.

This big change from summer to winter in just a matter of hours may have conjured up memories or questions regarding another old, November storm. The Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940 brought a similar, but much more intense change to wintry conditions. Comparing the two side-by-side, the cold front of 11/11/12 is hardly comparable to the crippling strength of the 1940 storm. While our temperature dropped from 66 degrees at Midnight Sunday to 23 degrees at 11:59pm Sunday, the temperature on 11/11/40 dropped from the 50s in the early morning to the teens by the mid afternoon. In addition to the drop in temperature came heavy rain, sleet and snow. The Armistice Day storm of 1940 claimed a total of 154 lives, more than 20 were duck hunters in the Winona area who were caught off guard by the dramatic shift in the weather.

Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society

Photographs from the Armistice Day Storm of 1940

Posted under history, severe weather, winter weather

Over the last week, pretty much every day someone was seeing some type of severe weather.  With that severe weather came a lot of beneficial rain.  Every day so far (Through the first 6 days) we have seen at least a trace of rain, with 4 of those 6 days being above .25 inches. (Amounts coming from the Rochester International Airport.)

Below is graphic of the state of Minnesota showing the clear deficit  in SE MN from last August til the end of April.  Even with the wet second half of April, we were just about 8 or so inches in the hole, but after a crazy wet start to May, things will be a bit better by the next issuance of this graphic by the DNR.

Heavy thunderstorms once again rolled through area late Saturday night into early Sunday morning and produced more heavy rain.  Below are some of the totals from the last 24 hours. (There are errors at both the Austin ans Albert Lea reporting sites.  Both sites picked up around .30 inches of rain)

Here is the breakdown heading into last summer.  The graphic shows it all and it is clear that tables are turning in a positive manner.  Through the last seven and a half months we have picked up only 8.8 inches of rain.  Over the last 24 days, we have picked up over half of what we got in about the last 8 months combined.

Rainfall Comparison

Posted under climate, history, minnesota, rainfall, rainfall amounts, spring, weather

I think a lot of people will remember this March.  Who can forget the birds chirping, flowers and trees budding early, and of course golf courses opening up almost a month before normal in some cases.  In the middle of the month we had a stretch of days that would have made for good pool days in the middle of Summer.  In a normal year, you would think that extreme “heat” in March would be followed up by a cold blast of some sort.  With the lack of snow cover, cold airmasses crossing over the ground tend not to hold their chill without a good snow pack to insulate them was one reason we didn’t see that.  Another reason, most of our weather systems came from the pacific area, rather than down from Canada where it would have been slightly cooler.  So how warm were?  The graphics below, and more importantly the numbers on them are mind blowing!

The first is the recap of some of the records we broke.  The warmest all time high in March was 82°.  That was one record, probably the only one that didn’t fall this month, but we cam extremely close with two days hitting the low 80s. (81,80)  The graphic below breaks down the big picture of March.

This is where the the REAL eye popping stat comes in.  In doing calculations to determine how warm we were for the month of March, I had to do them multiple times to make sure I was doing it right.  The graphic below shows us where we stand for warmest March of all time.  You would think with the temps we had that we’d be right up there.  Well, we were and then some.  These numbers are compiled by averaging the daytime high and overnight low of all 31 days of March.  By no surprise we were the warmest of all time.  What was a HUGE surprise to me was that we destroyed the previous warmest month of March of all time by 6.3 degrees.  That March had been our warmest March for the last 112 years and we blew it out of the water this year!  Here is the breakdown!

Posted under climate, history, just cool, minnesota, Records, Rochester

We are continuing the trend from our extremely mild Winter into the second week of March.  Astronomical Spring arrives in in 10 days, but it will be feeling like spring, and late spring at that before it officially rolls on through.  The jet stream (the dividing line between relatively warm and cold air), like much of the winter, will be staying to our north allowing warm air from the south to hang out in the Upper Midwest.

Jet Stream staying to our north allowing for warm air to stick around

Today (Saturday) temperatures made it into the low 60s for the second time in the last few days.  On average we don’t see 60s until later on in April.  On May 1st the average temperature in Rochester is 62°, so we are about a month and a half ahead of schedule temperature wise.

The average temperature on May 1st is 62°

In the coming days ahead we will likely see temperatures feeling more like the end of May and even early June.  That will no doubt threaten records in a number of locations.  Here are a few that have the potential to fall over the next several days.  These are the records, not the forecast.  To see the seven day forecast check out our website http://www.kttc.com/weather

These are the standing records for a few places that have the potential to be broken this upcoming week.

Posted under climate, history, Records, spring

We are approaching the end of Meteorological Fall, it officially ends December 1st when we welcome Meteorological Winter.  It’s been no secret we have been very dry over the past couple of months, but just how dry?  Meteorological Fall contains the months September, October, and November.  Over the span of the those three months we have only picked up 3.14 inches of precipitation.  The graphic below breaks Meteorological Fall down month by month.

Here is a list from the National Weather Service of the Top 10 Driest Meteorological Falls all time.  This is the driest Fall since 1999.  Now we have three days to go until this number can officially be put into the books, but the next chnace for precip is a slight one coming on Thursday, which marks the first day of Meteorological Winter, so these numbers will likely stand.  If we do in fact get no precip in the next 3 days the 3.14 will be the 8th driest in history, moving the current 8th place 3.15 to ninth all time.  I also want to note that October as a single month was the 5th driest October of all time.  It is just crazy how dry we have been as of late.

Posted under climate, Drought, fall, history, rainfall, Uncategorized, weather

The last time the calendar read 11-11-11, most of us weren’t alive and Veterans Day didn’t exist…yet.  That came about following the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I in 1918.  Of course, it was Armistice Day before it became Veterans Day, the holiday we observe today as we salute those who have served and continue to serve our nation in the armed forces.  Now back to the subject of today’s blog entry: the date was 11-11-11 one hundred years ago in 1911 and boy was it a warm November day, at least to start.  Temperatures climbed into the 70s and 80s across the Midwest in an unseasonably strong surge of warm air that occupied the region ahead of a strong cold front to the west.  That incredibly potent cold front quickly swept through the country during the day, dramatically dropping temperatures just about everywhere.  In Wisconsin, one location dropped from the 70s to zero by midnight!  That front also spawned some tornadoes in the region and here’s a newspaper article discussing that bizarre and dangerous November event.

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/a-century-ago-deadly-tornado-devastated-rock-county/article_6560136c-0be5-11e1-8286-001cc4c002e0.html

Here’s another article covering that historic cold blast that produced tornadoes and blizzard conditions in the U.S. on this date one hundred years ago:

http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/100-year-anniversary-extreme-cold-front_2011-11-10

Posted under history

In the interest of blog efficiency, I’m recycling this post that Meteorologist Ted Schmidt put together last year. Today is the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

It was just two weeks ago that we experienced one of the windiest weather events in our region’s history when an intense low pressure system cranked up our winds for two days and gusts occasionally reached 60 miles per hour.  During that event, we drew a number of comparisons to some historical autumn wind storms in the western Great Lakes, including the one in November 1975 that led to the infamous sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald the huge ore freighter, a tragedy that claimed the lives of all 29 men on board.  Today as we mark the 35th anniversary of the ship’s sinking, we look back at the weather conditions that created the strong winds and gigantic waves on Lake Superior.

The storm system that ultimately moved through Lake Superior in November, 1975 took almost the same path as the storm system that affected us last month and the wind speeds were similar with gusts in the 60 mile per hour range noted in most locations.  However, over the open waters of Lake Superior, the winds during the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking may have been even stronger with some gusts of 80 miles per hour registered and wave heights reaching 30 feet.  There is much to to be said about the incident and the timeline that led up to the sinking that occurred at 7:30 on the evening of November 10, 1975 so here are a couple of helpful sites that detail the events of that day.

“The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald”   (A look at the weather conditions and story of the ship.  It shows a couple of interesting charts that explain the wave action in relation to the wind speed and direction in that massive storm.)

Weather Events: The Edmund Fitzgerald Storm  (Another look at the timeline and weather charts that explain what happened during the infamous shipwreck.)

Posted under history, severe weather, wind, winter weather

We have been talking as of late how southeastern, Minnesota and northeastern, Iowa have been pretty dry over the last couple of months.  The lack of rain recently has caused the Mississippi River at La Crosse to drop to only 5.2 feet.  This would make it the lowest reading since June of 2010.  Here is the Full report from the National Weather Service in La Crosse:

Lowest Mississippi River Level In Over A Year

Posted under history, weather