A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
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The National Weather Service ingests data everyday from 900 automated stations in the United States. Since we are such a large nation, that's just not enough info for weather forecasting and climate calculation. NWS is also bolstered by 10,000 volunteer observers in the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program. Started in 1890, the program gathers info from farms, urban and suburban areas, National Parks and even seashores and mountaintops. There are observers in every state and...
Another Groundhog Day has come and gone, and this year Punxsutawney Phil predicted a short winter and a rapidly approaching spring. Of course, Phil’s accuracy rate is 39 percent. Coin flips are theoretically 50/50, and one of the famous almanacs has a 52-percent rating, so take all predictions with a grain of salt. Feb. 2 has long been an important day to many cultures because it falls midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Over time, the day became Candlemas, which marks t...
This past September, we had some tornado trouble in a month that turned out to be warmer than normal when averaged out. September’s departure from normal mean temperature was 4 degrees. Using that data and the numbers from the rest of the year, 2019 so far has a departure from normal of 0.25 degree. How will we fare in October? This month should have its ups and downs but there may enough warm weather to turn October’s departure from normal on the positive. We started off chilly and ove...
Last month, I mentioned how I inherited weather almanacs from the 1920s to the 1990s from a farmer who had passed away. Well, I also have a stack of National Geographic issues from the 1910s to the 1980s. One from 1913 had a long article about a game camera a fellow invented. The critter would trip a line that fired off a tray of that old fashioned flash powder used for old-time photography. The result was a photo of an animal running away from the bang of the exploding powder which could be...
An old farmer I knew passed away, and my part of the inheritance was a big box of old almanacs dating back to 1925. There were plenty of Farmer’s and Old Farmer’s almanacs and several other lesser-known books. A 1925 Swamp-Root Almanac came from the Carlton Drug Company. A 1948 De Laval was from Barnum Hardware (phone 38). A 1948 Rexall magazine with the “Perry Mason” show’s Barbara Hale on the cover was issued by Kinney Drugs in Carlton. A 1969 National Association of Retail Druggists...
July is always an important anniversary for me. After being a janitor at Channel 3 for more than a year, the bosses there showed no sign of promoting me; so, on July 2, 1987 I started at Channel 6 on the technical crew. Man, I was tempted to quit after that first night because of the hectic pace. I didn’t think all that stress was worth $3.35 an hour. But, like a good Iron Range Finn, I stuck it out. My interest in becoming part of the news media goes back to the ’70s when my father lent me his...
May's weather was full of cold mayhem around here this year. The snowstorm that brought close to a foot of snow to some towns on May 19th was the latest measurable snow in recorded history at least for the Duluth area. (I still remember flurries in Ely on July 4, 1977.) The final climate data from the National Weather Service in Duluth shows the May departure from normal mean temperature was -2.1 degrees. So far, 2019 has ranged from as cold as -4.5 degrees from normal in February to as warm as...
Spring seems to be here - and if not, at least the promise of spring is finally in the air after a good five months of winter. But I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Last year, the last blizzard blasted us on April 23. Spring never seems to be a sure thing around here. Only winter is a sure thing, it seems. What a winter we're shaking off! Some towns set snow records and others came close to the state low record. The Cotton area missed it by only four degrees. Temperature stats for...
The wind chill factor was developed by a fellow named Paul Siple in the late 1930s while he was on a research assignment in Antarctica for the U.S government. We knew we’d be getting into World War II, so Siple was assigned to develop winter gear and survival strategies for the military. Look him up sometime. He was involved in a lot of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. In the early days of my 25-plus-year weather career, I ran into a lot of oldtimers from before Siple’s time who didn’t belie...
Last month, retired lead forecaster Craig Sanders of the National Weather Service Duluth Forecast Office noted signs of the dreaded "polar vortex" returning in late January of this year. It sure looks like he was right! Several daily cold-temperature records were set for a few of our towns last month. There's even been talk of setting a new state record, after spending nearly 23 years in the hands of Tower-Soudan. This article was written just before the deep freeze hit, so if the record was...
Every new year makes me ponder the past and how things have changed. When I first became Jack McKenna's computer graphic artist back in 1987, TV weather in our region was only one year removed from magnets on sheet metal maps. Several of my old colleagues still use Jack's weather symbol magnets on their refrigerators and a big chunk of his old sheet metal map of the U.S. became inner fenders for my rusty and untrusty '68 Barracuda years ago. That 1980s weather computer was pretty primitive with...
