It’s winter, but the first half of January didn’t look or feel like it. “It’s milder than normal. It may turn colder toward the end of the month,” said Jeff Zoltowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Leelanau resident and retired meteorologist Dave Barrons, a familiar face on local television for many years, says climate change is making expectations based on past years less reliable. “We’ve added more carbon dioxide to the air. Carbon dioxide holds more heat,” he said.
The first half of January was brown and green in Leelanau County. According to the National Weather Service (NWS) in Gaylord, we’re on pace to set a record for lack of snow this month. Even with a few white flurries late in January, we may still eclipse the previous mark. NWS measures snow accumulation in two County locations—Maple City and Northport.
Interested in being able to recognize approaching weather patterns and report your findings to the National Weather Service? If so, as a severe weather spotter, you can play a pivotal role in helping the National Weather Service identify and report dangerous storms that can ultimately tore through an area and cause major damage.
According to the National Weather Service (NWS) website, conditions on Aug. 2 were ripe for something big to happen. “Northern Michigan experienced a complex severe weather setup,” it reports, “which began with a warm front lifting northward from southern Michigan toward the Straits of Mackinac and into the eastern Upper Peninsula.”
During one extraordinary week in August 2015, the sounds that dominated our town were the whirr of winds and the ugly crack of trees, followed by the buzz of chainsaws, the hum of generators, and the cheering and car honking as Consumers Power trucks and linemen rolled into town like a liberating army.
The windstorm that hit Leelanau County this week was the strongest storm ever to hit the continental United States, rivaling the pressure of tropical storms and surpassing the winds that doomed the famed Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975 in Lake Superior.