Happy Halloween, children and overgrown children of Lake County. Hope you enjoy going door-to-door dressed as a guy from “Deadliest Catch.”
For the third Oct. 31 in a row, Mother Nature has dialed up holiday weather that can only be described with foul language, although the National Weather Service managed to avoid doing so in its Thursday forecast: “Rain returns for Halloween. It is possible that the rain on Saturday is finished by the evening, but that will be further refined in the forecast in time, as confidence increases.”
If we do get the rain being semi-confidently projected for the daylight hours, we might see something close to 2013, when Halloween delivered .68 of an inch of rainfall in Waukegan, a record for the date. But even 2013 was nothing like the nightmare delivered on All Hallow’s Eve last year.
Gale warnings on Lake Michigan. Wind gusts of 45 mph in Waukegan and up to 70 mph off the Chicago lakefront, generating waves in the 10- to 20-foot range. Lakeshore flooding advisories as the lake level rose 2.5 feet.
Worst of all in 2014, there was snow on Halloween. Just a trace here in the Illinois version of Lake County (the one in Indiana had lake-effect totals hefty enough to make snowmen), but it is hard not to put too fine a point on it: There was snow on Halloween. In Chicago, which is not Saskatchewan.
Here in 2015, any burst of nasty weather after Labor Day is greeted with a universal thought: Does this mean we’re going to have a bad winter? Actually, raise your hand if you’ve survived so many cruel Chicago winters that you have such a thought in the middle of a cool week in summer.
History records that our 32-degree Halloween in 2014 truly was a harbinger of an unusually cold November. We had a mild stretch into Veterans Day, but then the bottom dropped out, with “high” temperatures in the low 30s and 20s for most of the next three weeks. When they tore down the Sauter Building in Waukegan on Nov. 14, thermal underwear was the order of the day as the demolition proceeded in January-level temperatures.
But then, hey, December 2014 was unusually warm (nine days with high temperatures above 40 degrees, nine more above 35). Christmas Day had the weather we should have had on Halloween, and it nearly hit 50 later that week.
As you might recall, the autumn of 2014 also featured much in the way of discussion about “El Nino,” or the warming of equatorial waters in the Pacific Ocean that affects weather patterns around the globe. As you might have noticed, that conversation has shifted into this fall, since El Nino overslept or something.
So what does the coming winter of 2015-16 have in store for those of us in the Chicago area and/or upper Midwest and/or Great Lakes Region? The word earlier this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center is that “a strong El Nino is in place and should exert a strong influence over our weather this winter,” with above-normal temperatures and drier-than-average conditions expected from December through February across the northern tier of the U.S.
On the other hand, there’s the Farmer’s Almanac, which issued its winter forecast way back in August and stamped Chicago with the words “cold, dry.” The Almanac crew apparently thinks that we’re in for a “weak to neutral” El Nino, which will deliver “colder than normal” weather to the Great Lakes.
While we only have to wait a matter of hours to find out how much rain we’ll get for Halloween 2015, the words of a local plow driver come to mind when determining how much snow we’ll really get in a given winter: “Ask me in April.”
Twitter @NewsSunDanMoran
