Last night Chicago got hit by severe storms that included hurricane-force winds:
Violent storms raked large sections of the Chicago area Tuesday evening, knocking power out to nearly a quarter million Chicago area residents and transforming some thoroughfares into darkened obstacle courses, hard to navigate with streetlights out and debris, ranging from large trees to power poles and garbage cans, impeding if not entirely blocking travel. Police in some of the hardest hit areas were forced to light flares to mark fallen trees.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing transformers exploding at the height of the storms while others described some neighborhoods as "war zones" after the onslaught of storms.
... The storms generated gusts as high as 130 km/h at Wheeling and 120 km/h at Peru, Elmhurst and Wheaton.
I was inside, as you can imagine, as the storms ran over my part of the city, with horizontal rain and, well, lots of wind. At one point I watched the groundskeepers at US Cellular Field blown around as they tried to get the tarp over the infield.
Ah, global warming.
Summer begins today at 12:16 CDT, which is good because I'm tired of this 32°C spring weather.
My objection to the past three months of Chicago weather probably sounds familiar: we've either had too little or too much heat, and during warm afternoons, when someone might want to sit outside and have a beer, we've had instead crashing rain. Today's forecast sounds just like that, too.
On the other hand, it beats this...
A huge temperature change putting Chicago in perspective, from HamWeather (degrees Celsius):
(And now for my Luddite readers, the same map in Fahrenheit:)
In the last 24 hours, Chicago's temperature has plunged from an asphalt-melting 35°C to a shiver-inducing 12°C:
(The chart shows degrees Celsius along the left and local time along the bottom.)
The drop right before 9am caught me by surprise. When I left the house (and it was 19°C outside), the polo and jeans I have on seemed appropriate. Three hours later, with Weather Bug reporting 10°C at the nearest station and O'Hare reporting 12°C, I really wish I'd brought a jacket to work.
WGN points out that the last three days comprise the hottest early-season heat wave since 1933.
Glad that's over...
Update, 12:39 CT: Weather Bug now reports 9°C at the Latin School, but O'Hare is holding steady at 12°C.
Via the WGN Weather Blog, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has produced a mongo cool video showing the tornadic activity in North America in April:
The National Storm Prediction Center reports a staggering 1,425 tornados so far this year, with 519 reported deaths. For comparison, the three-year averages are 1,376 tornados and 64 deaths for the entire year, putting this year at 248% and 1946% of average for events and deaths, respectively.
So, remember how the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis predicts increasing extreme weather? Yeah. Welcome to the new world.
We'll know for sure in the next couple of hours when yet another line of storms comes through, but at the moment it looks like Chicago will break its May rainfall record today:
[T]he approach of yet another vigorous weather system spells more storms - possibly severe - for waterlogged northeast Illinois. Only 10.4 mm of additional rain will catapult this May's rainfall, currently 182.6 mm, to 193 mm and the wettest May in Chicago weather history.
Squish, squish, squish.
A strong storm system just to the south of Chicago is drawing cooler air into the city from the northeast and the lake. At the moment we have some truly delightful weather: winds north-northeast at 35 km/h with gusts up to 62 km/h, visibility 5 km in mist, temperature 7°C with a windchill of 2°C.
Says WGN's Tom Skilling:
The last time it was even close to this cool on a May 26 was a half century ago in 1961 when a high of 9°C occurred. The average high this time of the year is 22°C which puts the day's predicted 7°C high some 16°C below the long-time average. By contrast, temperatures on this date a year ago hit 31°C—a level 23°C warmer.
In short, it's crappy outside.
This morning we had weather about as perfect as a human could hope for, 26°C and sunny by the lake, with a gentle breeze out of the southwest. I hopped on my bike for an actual workout, complete with heart-rate monitor, for the first time in a couple of years, then came back, grabbed my camera, and walked the dog. Some results:
ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/640, 225mm
ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/500, 55mm
As I continue to evaluate Adobe Lightroom, I'm trying to figure out how best to use it. Since about 2000, I've kept the raw copies of everything my various digital cameras produced, making copies of almost all of them with names and metadata. Lightroom obviates that step, because it saves metadata and editing steps separately from the image files, preserving the raw camera output. If I need a JPEG version of a photo, I can simply export it—edited, and with all the relevant metadata.
This changes everything. I'm just now sure how. For my first step, I've set my camera to shoot only photos in raw (Canon .cr2) format. They're a lot bigger—25 MB vs. 5 MB for JPEG—but so what? Hard drive space is around $100 per terabyte, which works out to 0.24¢ per photo. (It adds up, though; I took 4,635 photos and videos in 2010 and I've taken 2,351 so far this year, and their combined 24.1 GB use up a whopping $2.35 of hard drive space.)
As I write this, dark clouds have rolled in and radar shows thunderstorms just about on top of us. I feel like I took good advantage of the excellent weather. I even remembered sunscreen today, and had the foresight yesterday to install my air conditioners. Now I've got some real work to do, though. Sounds like it's time to go to my Remote Office...
The temperature in Chicago dropped precipitously mid-morning:
Temperatures are dropping up to 14°C in less than an hour as a lake enhanced cold front sweeps across the Chicago area. The steepest temperature drops have been occurring along the lakefront and in the Loop where readings hovered in the mid-20s Celsius for a while this morning. Post-frontal temperatures downtown and along the lake are now around 10°C, with little or any recovery expected today as a stiff northeast wind prevails.
At Wrigley Field, the temperature dropped from 22°C degrees at 10:10AM to 14°C degrees at 10:17AM.
And now it's raining. The good news is, I brought an umbrella to work. The bad news is, I also brought a dog, and I'm wearing jeans and a polo shirt without a jacket. Brrr.
Earlier I mentioned today would be the warmest since October 11th. True; but it turned out warmer than any since August 29th. Today the official temperature at O'Hare hit a record 32°C, warmer than Miami, Cancún, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.
The cool lake waters and warm inland temperatures generated a strong lake breeze that kept us almost 14°C cooler downtown.
Tomorrow may be warmer...