Storm to clear out faster than expected, nice weekend ahead!
Greetings and welcome!
The weather picture is a lot clearer this morning. The models and forecasts have come into pretty good agreement on things, and it is very favorable for the weekend.
The storm is what some forecasters refer to as a double barrel low pressure. There are two associated storms in a row. Earlier forecasts had the first one hitting today, and the second hitting Saturday into Sunday.
Yesterday one of the models started flirting with the idea of the second storm going well south of us and leaving us with a good weekend. Today the rest are on board with that.
The HPC is probably the most aggressive with the rain, showing <0.25″ between Saturday at 6am and noon. After Saturday noon there is only a minor chance of rain throughout the models.
The first wave of the storm has passed through and it was wet. As of 11am the big wave is here. There is ongoing rain, thunder, and it is as dark out as if it were 9pm at night. The rainfall is probbly in the 1.5-2″ per hour range, it is really hammering out there. We have seen a lot of rain, and there is a lot more coming in the near future.
The Peshtigo did come up this morning as I predicted. Even Chris doubted it, but I said no, there is another push coming from the mid-week heavy rain in the far reaches of the watershed. It just takes 3 days to get here. It showed a rise this morning finally.
As of this morning the Pesh is higher than it has been since April 10th. (click the graph)
Those weekends were in the 270-280CFS range, and we are running 239 as of 8am. That will continue to rise from the Tuesday/Wednesday rain, plus it is a total deluge outside. That will raise it too. I am going big here and predicting in excess of 300cfs and over +2″ for Saturday’s noon rafting trip on the Pesh.
The other thing here is that a rising river is just plain more fun. The pushier water makes the waves bigger, and the splashes more fun. This will be a rising river with some force behind it. There are going to be some great times on the river this weekend.
People running the Menominee River are in for a treat too. Based on current flow and water to come, that should hit 2,000cfs this weekend. That river is so much fun when it gets big.
I know a lot of you don’t raft or care about it. This is a big deal for me. Between the drought and people deciding that my pictures would be a good place to save a buck in a bad economy, I was down to about 16% of my normal earnings last quarter. Yes I am pretty excited that the drought turned around in such an amazing way.
I also want to point out that this drought busting wet stretch was the one that I was looking for early in spring when the El Nino started fading. I was kind of hoping for it in March so that we could snowmobile on it and then raft on it in spring, but it came much later.
Well the radar is showing the back of the big storm already to Wausau, and not much of anything behind it. It looks like the weekend will turn out ok for weather and great for rafting.
Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!
RJB