Friday March 19th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

The nice weather this week had people itching to go outside and get started with spring activities. Stuff like cleaning up the yard and going fishing were discussed, along with firing up the grill. It was a nice week indeed, with some days at about the limit of our climatology. Our normal high is 38, and usually we are within 30 degrees at the most. That day that hit 66 was 28 degrees above normal, and pretty unusual.

At one point it looked like we could see a weekend storm, and one of the model runs even put forth a scenario of us getting 12-20″ of snow. It is not gonna happen, but we knew that.

Instead we have a pair of cold fronts coming from our northwest and pushing the storm down toward the state line and points south. The first one already came through, and brought a line of showers on the radar that never showed up on the ground, at least not here.

The cloudy day today is expected to continue Saturday as well, though it could break up as the storm moves away. Sunday they expect to be sunny. The NWS is looking fo mid-40s both days, and nothing for snow north of Green Bay.

Next week the colder weather is expected to stick around. We are again looking for highs in the mid-40s. There is a chance of a clipper midweek and a bigger storm for the weekend.

In events for this weekend..

There are some constants every year at this time. The road bans come and keep heavy trucks off of the roads while the frost under them thaws. Likewise the snowmobile & ATV trails closed the 15th for the same reason.

The other one is that between the snow melt and the big greening of the land, we usually have a stretch with high fire danger. As last year’s dead vegetation dries out, we will likely see wildfire conditions go to a moderate or high state. I haven’t seen anything yet, but usually it comes about the time people want to start cleaning up yards and such.

Last fall the pilot program allowing SUTVs/LUTVs onto the ATV trail expired in September. March 4th the state passed a law extending that. The new law will likely require a registration sticker from the state (Instead of the county) and instead of being a pilot program in a few counties, it is open to any county that wants to allow them. Marinette County participated last time and will very likely again do so. Thank you goes out to Slug & Greg Reinhardt for keeping us up to date on this. Here is a link to the bill (PDF Format).

On one of our nice days this week I walked down by the Peshtigo River to see how the ice out is coming along. The river was on the rise, and a lot of the ice in the rapids section has been cleared out. When I checked this morning it had risen up to about +12 over the course of the week. We don’t start rafting with Kosirs for two weekends yet, but private boaters could likely get in the first run of the year.

As always I am very much looking forward to spring rafting with Kosir’s. The big water makes it wild and worth going in April. I am not sure what to expect this year, but I am not too worried about it. Most of the watershed had a pretty normal fall and winter for rainfall/snowfall. There is not a really deep frost in the ground, but there is some, and most of it is still there.  The swamps aren’t overflowing, but they do have decent water.

As with any spring, it will be rainfall dependent. If we get a big storm or two it will roar, if not it should be about average. Most of the watershed is between Goodman Park and Crandon, and they had a decent enough winter. Don’t forget that the Christmas and January storms brought a lot of rain before the snow, and we had a week of wet weather late fall too.

Now it is a matter of a storm or two making it really roar. The two weekends after this one both show potentially big storms, and the one for about 4-1 looks like a really big one.

If there is one thing that 20 years of watching this river has taught me is that you just don’t know. “That was pretty fun..” and “What an incredible trip!” are only one good storm apart. How do you predict that?

Personally I am looking forward to a good spring. I have a hunch that the fading El Nino will eventually let us get back into the storm path and it will work out, maybe with big results.  We are going to see cold weather and below freezing nights that will drop the river and halt the thaw next week. Behind that are numerous chances of big storms in the next few weeks, and yes we are due. At the moment I am a lot more worried about being out of shape from winter than water levels.

That is about it from here. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB