It is getting to the point where the snowmelt contest requires a daily trip to Rib Mountain in order to observe the day when it finally melts. I was up there yesterday of course and got some new video. The main pile of snow was about half the size it was on Monday. I suspect we will have a winner later this week. It would be quite interesting if we ended up with a winning date of May 28th as that is the day that most people predicted. 101 people predicted May 28th. It is always exciting when it gets down to the wire and we draw the top winners. This year we have 5 R-store gift cards to give away as well as car wash coupons. We will hold a drawing to see who wins the gift cards and everyone else who predicted the correct date will get car wash coupons.

One thing that might help get rid of the remaining snow is some heavy rain. Yesterday heavy rain fell west of Wausau. As forecast, there were pockets of downpours that produced over an inch of rain. The highest report I saw was 2.9 inches, although I cannot fully vouch for the number because it was only scribbled on a post it note in the weather office, most likely a phone call from yesterday. Radar estimates also showed some higher rain amounts between Athens and Stetsonville (where the report was from) so that lends credence to the report. There were also reports of trees down and sporadic power outages around Medford, Spencer, Loyal, and Neillsville.

Today the highest chance of thunderstorm activity (40%) will be through early afternoon. The heavier downpours will again be hit or miss. If we don’t have any rain or thunderstorms by 3pm then the cold front has likely moved through the area dry and we will have to wait until Sunday for the next chance of thunderstorms. Right now I am calling for a 40% chance of storms during the late afternoon or evening hours on Sunday, otherwise most of the holiday weekend is looking quite nice. Get-away Friday and Saturday should both be sunny with high temps around 80 on Friday and in the low to mid 80s on Saturday. Most of Sunday should be nice until the chance of thunderstorms arrives. Monday is looking cooler but dry with high temps in the low to mid 70s.

Space News:

How about a couple follow-ups to some recent space exploration stories. If you remember, NASA was trying to re-establish communication with the Phoenix lander to see if it survived the Martian winter. They were not successful. They did however get a good photograph of the lander which seems to show significant damage to the solar panels.

In other Mars exploration news, it looks like the newest probe (the Mars Science Laboratory, named Curiosity) will launch in 2011 and arrive on the red planet in August of 2012. While that seems like forever, it is probably worth the wait since the robot will have a high definition color video camera. My only other hope is that it will be able to move faster than the current rovers on Mars – which poke along at a snail’s pace.

Off to Rib Mountain to check on the snow!

Have a good Wednesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Severe Weather, Snowmelt 2010, Space

Time for a look at this week’s US Drought Monitor. Overall, there was not much change in the country or individual states, including Wisconsin. The dry areas remained relatively dry while the wet areas got wetter – including Wisconsin. That is the strange part about watching the recent weather pattern – the heavier rain keeps hitting southern Wisconsin and this will probably happen again on Monday. From the most basic perspective – rain missing a particular area time-after-time – of course, leads to a drought.

WI Drought Analysis

However, drought can also happen when storm systems move through an area but do not produce precipitation. This particular drought has developed because of many storms coming close to the Northwoods but not quite making it. The only significant precipitation recently was the heavy snow last Friday night. While the Northwoods has seen a few tenths of an inch this month, southern Wisconsin has seen a few inches. The “rich” get richer. The drought will not get any better over the next week because not much rain is in the works for the Northwoods, or most of Wisconsin. After the 20th, the weather pattern will be more conducive to thunderstorm activity so there is still some hope for relief.

Space News:

An update on the attempt to contact the Mars Phoenix Lander. The last try will occur from May 17th to May 21st. It is near the Summer solstice on Mars so the maximum amount of sunlight should be hitting the Phoenix solar panels. If it hasn’t woken up by now, then it likely suffered a critical electronics failure during the Martian winter.

One spacecraft that outlived its original mission by a great deal is Voyager 2. It began a grand tour of the solar system back in 1977. It is still communicating with earth 33 years later, even as it continues moving far out into the cosmos. It takes over 13 hours to send and receive communication from Voyager 2. By comparison, it only takes light from the sun 8 minutes to reach earth. Finally, it seems Voyager 2 might be showing its age. A change in its data communication pattern happened on April 22nd. This change makes it impossible for mission planners to decode the science data beamed back to earth. They are currently working to fix it, because even though Voyager is out of the solar system, it can still do interesting research about energetic fields in extra-solar space.

It took Voyager 2 33 years to get to the edge of the solar system. Hopefully future spacecraft will make it a lot quicker. That is the purpose of the Project Icarus. The study group will investigate different methods of interstellar space travel. Most of the technology to “get there” is still very speculative, but technology has changed quite a bit since the last study group took on the challenge of evaluating long distance space travel. Who knows what it will come up with. No doubt it will be interesting.

Lastly, no winner yet in the 2010 snowmelt contest yet. Warmer weather is on the way this weekend and next week but it looks like there is enough snow on Rib Mountain to last close to the end of the month.

Have a good weekend! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Drought, Snowmelt 2010, Space

It is Thursday so time for a US Drought Monitor update. As you could have guessed, no change in the drought conditions here in Wisconsin. We are still experiencing drought in the northern third of the state and this is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

No change in WI drought

The weather has been drier than normal since the beginning of the year and it looks like it will continue that way for the next 7 to 10 days at least. At this point it looks like the next big storm moving from west to east across the nation will stay to our south on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. When the next big snow or rain storm will hit Northcentral Wisconsin is still up in the air. I have got my fingers crossed for some heavy precipitation this Spring. Drought during the winter does not matter much. Drought during the growing season can bring a lot of grief.

Since almost nothing is happening in the weather I might as well turn to some of my other favorite blog subjects – such as space travel.

In a follow up on the attempt to revive or at least converse with the Mars Phoenix lander, NASA folks have begun listening once again for any signs of life. The attempt began in January, but was unsuccessful. The martian sun is now higher in the sky and the temps are getting warmer so mission planners are trying again. It is unlikely that the Phoenix will “rise from the ashes” or should I say “frost”, but it would be interesting if it started operating again. Besides conducting some additional experiments, engineers could figure out which parts survived and which parts broke during the cold martian winter.

The Phoenix lander might be down for the count but another mission keeps producing interesting data. The Cassini mission to Saturn has revealed some cool new pictures of the moon Encaledus and has detected more signs of liquid water and chemicals needed for life as we know it. It is amazing that just a few years ago, Enceladus was considered a dead lifeless ball of ice and rock. Now astro-biologists think there is a chance (remote as it might be) that life could form in such an environment.

Another moon of Saturn has gotten a close up examination by Cassini. It is the moon Minas. It is a peculiar moon that has a large impact crater that makes it look like and “eyeball”. Minas is not as dynamic as Enceladus but it does hold one mystery. Why wasn’t it blown apart by the huge meteor impact? The crater on Minas is one-third the diameter of the entire moon. Many astronomers expect that such an impact should have blown the moon to “smithereens”. I can’t imagine there would be much left of the earth if it was struck by something large enough to create a crater one-third the diameter of the planet.

Another mission that is somewhat of a follow up is that of Stardust. It is on a path to rendezvous with the comet Temple 1. If that name sounds familiar, it should. This is the same comet that was blasted by the satellite Deep Impact back in 2005. It was a spectacular explosion on the surface of Temple 1 and the mission was a great success. Even though the official stated mission of Deep Impact and Stardust is to study comets, I wonder if the real primary mission was test how easy it would be to destroy or alter the course of a comet. In any case, Stardust should be able to see what damage was left behind by Deep Impact. We will see around February 14th of 2011. Less than a year away!

In human space travel news good news has arrived from the moon. India’s lunar satellite Chandrayan-1 returned data from the north pole of the moon indicating large amounts of ice just below the surface. If we are going to build bases on the moon we will need plenty of water and it would be almost impossible to transport all we need from the earth.

Of course we will need new rockets and space vehicles to transport us to the moon someday and private space ventures could help out a great deal. In this article, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites makes the case for sub-orbital flights as essential before getting into orbit. The key aspects of the sub-orbital flights (by Virgin Galactic) will be to prove safety, reduce cost, and develop new technology.

Of course Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are not the only players in the market for commercial human space flight. Another company – Blue Origin – has been secretly developing a new rocket capable of vertical take -off and landing. They recently held a press conference but did not let out many new details as to their progress.

Have a fine Thursday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Drought, Space

First a look at the forecast. It still looks cold for the last day of the year and the first few days of 2010. This is a little unusual for an El Nino winter but still not terribly cold for Wisconsin. Low temps could go a few degrees below zero on Saturday and Sunday morning. The most significant snowfall will be lake effect snow each day from Thursday through Monday in the favored areas of northern Wisconsin – generally north of highway 70. There could be a couple inches each day, with even more in the UP of Michigan. The heaviest snow in central Wisconsin will occur Wednesday afternoon and evening when there could be an inch or so. High temps will only be in the single digits to around 10 degrees from Friday through Sunday.

Year-End Recap:

Click here to review numbers 10 through 6 which were detailed in yesterday’s blog entry. Ray mentioned that yo-yo temps should be in the list in 2009 and they do appear in some of the items from yesterday and today. This was particularly true in the 2nd half of the year. July was very cool and dry, August was wet (6.21″ rain), September was warm and very dry, October was cool and wet, and November was warm and relatively dry.

5. December 8th/9th Blizzard. This was the biggest snowstorm of the year and it was the first time I remember a blizzard warning being issued for Marathon county (at least as far back as 1995). The blizzard warning covered most of the area and snow totals ranged from about 10 inches in Wausau to 14 to 17 inches in the southeastern part of the area. Two record snowfalls were recorded in Wausau, 4.5 inches on the 8th and 5.5 inches on the 9th.

4. Summer drought. For the 7th year in a row, Wausau and most of northcentral Wisconsin will end up with below normal precipitation for the year. The drought really got going during the last 12 days of June and continued through July. Many area crops were saved (just barely) by above normal rainfall in August. In September the drought returned and was particularly severe in the northwestern third of the state.

3. Lack of severe weather. Temps were below normal for most of the summer and precipitation was also below normal. Cool and dry conditions usually not conducive to severe weather such as tornadoes and thunderstorms. There were only a handful of severe thunderstorm warnings in the area and most of those were due to marginally severe hail. The worst severe weather damage of the year occurred in Rib Mountain on August 3rd. A microburst downed trees over a couple block area and damaged houses. Since the damage occurred in the middle of the night and in such a small area, it was not detected by radar or reported to the NWS so no severe thunderstorm warning was issued on that particular day.

2. Very cool and dry July. It did not feel like summer during what is normally the warmest month of the year. The average high temperature in Wausau during the month was only 75.3. Normally it should be 80.8. The warmest temperature of the month was 85 and the thermometer hit 80 only 5 times. High were in the 60s on 5 different occasions. The high of 62 on July 17th broke the record for coldest high temperature on that date. It was the 4thcoldest July on record as well as the 3rd driest. As mentioned above, a severe drought developed during the month as Wausau only received 1.19 inches of rain.

1. Record dry September. Some might not think this event as deserving of the top weather event of the year, but whenever a month breaks an all-time record, it has to be in the running. Couple this with the fact that 2009 was relatively un-eventful and the record dry September sticks out a bit more. How much rain fell? Only 0.23 inches. The old record for the driest September in Wausau was 0.43 inches set back in 1952. September of 2009 was the driest September in over 100 years of record-keeping in Wausau. Being that the month was very dry meant that there were many sunny days. The sunny dry weather was surreal. Day after day was gorgeous. It was like living in southern California. High temps were in the 70s and low 80s every day except the last 3 days of the month when the mercury dipped into the 50s.

Other Year-End Lists:

The top 7 software/technology/web disruptions of 2009. Some of these things you might already own or use.

Not sure if I posted this one: The year in Energy. A good review of all the alternative energy developments. Interesting side note – mining lithium for use in advanced batteries is becoming big business. Here is an article about the “mining” process in Bolivia. One potential problem with relying on Bolivia for lithium is that it is ruled by a leftist dictator.

For all the geeks out there: The year in robotics. Very interesting to see how close we are to the idealized robot servant “Rosie” from the Jetsons.

One of my favorite topics: Astronomy Milestones in 2009. Some related articles: The Mars rover Spirit is still stuck but it is still making scientific discoveries. The Cassini spacecraft has caught an image of a sun glint off of the Saturn’s moon Titan, which adds further evidence to the existence of liquid lakes on its surface. The Pheonix lander could “awake” again as the sun returns north during the Martian Spring. The odds are not great, but if the electronics survived the winter, it could phone home once again. The next Mars lander the “Mars Science Laboratory” is being built but unfortunately is 400 million over budget. This does not bode well for future funding of NASA projects. Lastly, some new  cool pictures of the geysers erupting out of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Coming tomorrow, Part 1 of the top 10 weather events of the last 10 years in Northcentral Wisconsin.

Have a fine Tuesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Science, Space, Weather History