Greetings and welcome!
It is not a very nice day outside today. Like the rest of the Upper Midwest we are getting the wind and rain of a very large storm. Some places are reporting as little as 0.5″ by Fon du Lac up to an inch and a half in Shawano.
The radar returns are showing 2-3″ south of here, but with so much rain between here and there reflecting the signal, the radar is not showing our area or the watershed well.
Here in Silver Cliff I would guess our rainfall at the moment to be in the 1.5-2″ range and growing. It has been a steady series of waves of moderate or heavy rain.
At some point around noon the power came back on based on the flashing clocks. I wasn’t here so I am not sure if it was an outage or just a brief blink.
The TV weather channel 2-2 is showing a 24 hour temperature drop of over 20 degrees for most of the area. Athelstane Weather is showing a 23.3 degree difference. It was very nice out yesterday, today is a sharp contrast to that.
Last weekend I predicted that the Peshtigo River would stay steady or maybe bump up a little. It bumped up a little and gave people that came whitewater rafting a really fun river. People had a great time. I will have a photo gallery posted on the Facebook page a little later tonight and linked into Kosir’s page.
The whitewater rafting section of the Peshtigo River will be wild this weekend. Right now it is running at about +12″ and rising very quickly. With a couple of inches of rain today and more coming, I am going to start my water level prediction for Saturday noon at the 20-30″ range. If were to go for a specific number I’d guess 24.
I have it from a reliable source that the ground up in the watershed is still soggy from the frost coming out, and there are even still patches of snow in the woods. With a couple of inches of rain running off quickly from the already saturated or still frozen ground, the rain goes right to the river and makes it rise quickly. That is what Spring whitewater rafting is all about.
If you are into whitewater rafting, this looks like the weekend to go. The rain has fallen and it is a *sure thing* that the river will be big and fun and worth the ride from IA, IN, MN or IL. This is most likely the biggest weekend of the year for water levels.
We will see the river rising as the week progresses. With a long narrow watershed it takes 2-3 days for rain in the upper watershed to get here. That times out well with Friday and weekend rafting trips catching the big push of water from the storm. We will see an initial push from the local watershed, but the big rise should come Thursday-Saturday. Here is a link to a page that I made many moons ago about the Peshtigo River and its watershed. http://www.silvercliff.com/rafting/rafting2.html
There is another storm showing up on the models for later this week. It is sort of an unusual scenario, so I am not taking it too seriously yet. If it happened as shown, we would see more rain for Thursday followed by a warming trend for Friday and Saturday and a possible storm for the second half of the weekend.
Well, duty calls, so I have to cut this a little short. I am planning on coming back later with some weekend pictures. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB