NorthernDestinations.com

Tuesday March 23rd, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

My apologies that I am running late today. I got a little sucked into work this morning and I am running a little behind.

Anyway.. we have some nice weather coming up and some good events for the weekend.

For weather it looks like another dry week. The temps will be close to 50 most days, except for Friday which will be a lot closer to 35 or 40. The weekend brings a slight chance of rain or snow and a high/lo of about 50/30.

Our El NIno continues to hang on. Recently there was a new Kelvin wave heading east. A Kelvin wave is a wave of warm water reinforcing the positive seas surface temperate anomalies that we call El Nino.

Anyway, there is another Kelvin wave working across, so hope of El Nino breaking down have been dashed for the very short term anyway.  Some of the climate experts that I see discussing this seem to think that it is a last gasp, but some models have the warm anomalies hanging around into summer. The high pressure that blocks us from storms is back too.

Item two is a little off topic. In my climate studies I have run across a guy named Henrik Svensmark and a lot of back and forth about his theories. IN  nutshell, distant supernova stars project neutrons at high speed through space. As they hit our atmosphere, they interact and make cloud nuclei. As the theory goes, in times of low solar output and low solar wind the sun’s smaller heliopshperic current sheet (my desktop background) protects us from less of them. That would explain more clouds and a cooler climate during solar minimums even though (TSI) Total Solar Irradiance, does not change much. It is controversial.

Now the same ET neutron bombardment know as cosmic rays is maybe responsible for Toyota’s woes? This article is one of many with the same copy. Apparently it went out over some news wires.

This is sort of relevant here because I had two questions from two different people in two different places Sunday about shooting stars and northern lights. People were missing them. The shooting stars is easy, there are several different debris clouds that the earth passes through like the Perseids where there are fairly regular meteor showers.

The northern lights will be occasional, but will be increasing as the years pass. We are in a solar minimum right now, and a more active sun makes for more northern lights. We are seeing an increase in sun spots and CME’s (coronal mass ejections), but we are at the bottom of the roughly 11 year cycle and about to head up. Since solar cycle 23 had a log quiet period and we are are actually a little late on the upswing, predictions have Solar Cycle 24 for a weak cycle. The northern lights will get progressively more frequent over the next 4-5 years.

Science class dismissed.

First up in events we have this..

Chute Pond Snowmobile Club’s Annual Banquet will be held Saturday, March 27th at Black Bear Trail Golf Club in Suring. Great food & drink, door prizes, and raffles make this an evening you won’t want to miss. We are starting early this year- cocktails at 5:00 pm, dinner at 6:00 pm, and we promise to be done in time so you can get over to see Vic Ferarri at Water’s Edge on Anderson Lake.Get your tickets now- visit our website’s Calendar of Events page for ticket information: http://www.chutepondsnowmobileclub.com. Hope to see you there.
Dan from Chute Pond

There is also one that snuck up on me a little.. Indoor mini-golf while bar hopping. This weekend there will be a mini-golf course with a hole set up at each of 9 bars along Parkway Rd between Fisher’s Camp & Curve Inn.

I also heard something the other day that sounds interesting. I was at Fisher’s Camp for a burger and a beer and we were talking about events.

Saturday April 10th, Fisher’s Camp Resort-

Flashback Remember When… 2001-2004. Glen and Deb are back (and the crew). Come join Deb and Glen as they run the bar all day and night.

Saturday July 31st Fisher’s Camp Grand Opening Party 11:00a.m. to ?. Doug and Linda Stacy will be doing their ever famous Chicken Booyah, Live music outdoors, Drawings etc. Come and join us for a great time. It’s Doug and Linda’s anniversary that day as well.

While I was at Fisher’s Camp I saw that the bay was still frozen. Most lakes are, but the ice is eroding along the shore. The upstream of Caldron falls is not frozen, it is open.

Also noteworthy, WPS did not drop the water levels much on Caldron Falls Flowage yet. They had said that they would drop Caldron after march 15th. But it isn’t down much compared to other years. Usually you see the ice collapsed as the water drops 4-6 feet. If it is down at all it is inches.

The two reasons that I hear that they drop the water is to break up the ice and to make room for the big rush of snowmelt water coming down the Peshtigo River. I don’t think that either is much of a problem this year thanks to the cursed El Nino.

Well I am going to get this posted. In my travels today I hope to recover my camera from Rapids and will have pictures of some of the people from Firelane’s poker run last weekend and my flowage pictures.

That is about it for today.  Have a good Tuesday and thank you for visiting!

RJB

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

March 17th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

It is a nice one indeed. It is sunny and 55, and it looks pretty inviting out there..

Yesterday we saw a high of 67.3 at Athelstane Weather. That is a pretty nice day. I didn’t get to play, I was a good boy and I worked a double yesterday so that I could play outside today. I did not know that it was 67..

I told you yesterday that it wouldn’t snow 15 or 20 inches for the weekend. The last three model runs agree. Now the storm is shown pivoting south of us and we would be lucky to see 1-3. LOL  But wait… It runs again at noon..

One thing that has been pretty consistant in the models is the breakdown of the big high pressure system that shielded us from storm after storm this winter. We could actually see stuff like Alberta Clippers, real southern storms, and some variability in our upcoming weather. It is actually a pretty stormy outlook, and it is not all nice. Some could get a little cold.

You guys really didn’t think it went from snowmobiling to sunny & 65 in 2 weeks didja? This was our spring tease. The NWS says 30s early next week heading for the 40s later. Our normal hi/lo in Rhinelander right now is 38/16. Fifty five or sixty is a nice day, but not the norm yet.

Well I am off to go and get some outside work done, and maybe dig up my obnoxious Irish shirt for later.

Have a good St Paddy’s Day and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Tuesday March 16th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

It is another spectacular spring day outside. Our high of 59 is now 64 and rising, and our cloudy day with isolated showers is really a spectacular sunny day.

The new critter of the day yesterday was a flock of turkeys. They seem to like this area in spring, and they are back. I will see what else there is too see soon when I bail on work and go to stretch my legs a little.

We are looking at a nice week ahead right up to the weekend. From about Saturday on there will be a storm affecting the region.

Earlier model runs were showing us getting as much as 4-8 Sunday, but the in the midnight run they have pushed the snow part of the storm south. Our friends along the state line would enjoy similar totals if it held up, with us getting a little less, maybe 3-6.

The 6am model run looks very different. That one is not showing much rain for us. That shows snow starting Saturday morning and going until late Sunday night. The path of the low would be a bull’s eye for putting us in a lot of snow. The QPF on the storm is conservatively in the 1-1.75″ range with 1/4″ more possible. That is rainfall equivalent. Use about a 12:1 to figure snow depth.

It is just a forecast, and it will change again. Six hours ago it was a 2-4 maybe 3-6 event with some rain in the front. No I don’t believe that we are in for 12-18″ of snow, maybe going to 15-20. It is just what it shows now.

The GFS in particular is prone to convective feedback and overstating storms in general. At that point until it gets closer, shows some consistency, and is verifiable with other models, it is for entertainment only. I do expect some precip for the weekend, and it might get interesting. At the moment I am eying any dramatic totals with skepticism.

The one constant in the models is us getting some wind behind the storm.

The events for the weekend have not changed. We have the poker run with the Firelane Bar and the chicken dinner with the Stephenson VFD, both on Saturday.

Well I am off to get back to work so that I can escape before sunset and enjoy a little of the nice day.

Have a good Tuesday and thank you for visiting!

RJB