Witch of November

[Robert Dewey]

I had a hard maple tree that looked awesome on Friday, totally covered in bright yellow and orange leaves. Between the 50mph winds in the thunderstorm Friday night and the 40mph gradient winds all day Saturday needless to say it is now totally bald. The nice thing is all the leaves blew into the next county..

This wasn't even close to a witch of November type storm though. The really big ones are very rare.

Yeah, in a true November storm, the winds would be much more widespread... The intensity of the winds are about the same as I experienced yesterday, just on a more widespread scale...

Looking at the news, 249K people lost power yesterday at one point or another... 150K are still without power... :shock:

 

[Glenn Rivers]

This past weekends storm

I guess that I underestimated this past weekend storm's potential to produce a significant synoptic or sub-synoptic scale wind event. I take it that most of the fierce surface winds coincided with the dry slot near the cold front. Here in S Ontario the, dry-slot arrived in the evening, reducing the potential for strong surface winds.

Over Lake Michigan, the strongest surface winds instead seemed to have occurred (as is so often the case) under the low level wrap around cloud deck behind the cold front, as surface air temps dipped to slightly below the water temps, enhancing the sensible heat flux from the water surface, and enhancing the mixing in the lowest 100-150 mb.

That was a nice surf picture from Muskegon by “mikegeukesâ€￾. I suspect that the waves were even bigger than he thought….The S Michigan buoy recorded a 3 hour mean of Significant wave height of 12 feet…quite impressive given the buoy’s short WSW fetch of ~30 miles. With greater fetch, the waves were probably even bigger at Muskegon.