Geeze, is it ever blowing out there! The low pressure system that I’ve been harping about this past week has been moving through the Great Lakes, bringing with it temperatures in the low 70s, rich dewpoints, heavy rain, and wind gusts as high as 48 miles an hour.
The 980 mb low has nudged off the Minnesota border into Ontario and continues to deepen rapidly as it heads east. You can see the line of storms firing along the cold front all the way down into the Gulf. Mississippi and Alabama got hammered earlier with an outbreak of supercells, but that action seems to have died down now. Not so the wind here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It began picking up from the south in the afternoon, but it has now veered to the southwest with the passage of the cold front.
Temperatures have dropped over ten degrees over the past hour or so. The KGRR station ob says 58 degrees, but just 60 miles to my east, KLAN is registering 70 degrees.
There won’t be much left of the leaves come tomorrow morning. This system has been typical of a Michigan October–a wind machine that denudes the trees, delivering the coup de grace to the warm season and requiring those of us who live in the Great Lakes to gird our minds for winter. Ugh! These next five months won’t be fun.
