Cooler by the lake: Big temperature swing across Minn.
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We know Minnesota has highly variable weather at times.
We're a big state.
When you live in a piece of territory that stretches 400 miles from north to south at this latitude you're going to get some wildly different weather. Especially in September.
Case in point:
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82 degrees air temperature at Montevideo in western Minnesota at 4:34 p.m. Wednesday
43 degrees at Silver Bay and Grand Marais at 4 p.m. Wednesday
39 degrees temperature contrast across Minnesota in the same hour Wednesday afternoon
Yes, it felt like mid summer, or late fall, with hints of winter in Minnesota today depending on where you live. Hey, all weather is local right?
It's true, the frigid waters of the big lake they call Superior makes its own weather. Wednesday's slight northeast flow over Superior was enough to push a significant lake breeze boundary southwestward off the big lake. That only increased an already sizable temperature contrast across central Minnesota.
Check out the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite East 1-km visible image from the College of DuPage Weather Lab Wednesday afternoon. I've overlaid temperatures and winds. You can clearly see the lake breeze boundary driving the big temperature contrast.
Pretty interesting stuff if you're a weatherman in Minnesota. Yes, I get a little geeked in the Huttner Weather Lab on days like this.
Frosty up north
The air mass up north doesn't have far to go to get to freezing overnight. Frost and freeze warnings are up for a big chunk of northeast Minnesota Thursday morning.
More summer than fall in the next 7 days?
Overall, the next week looks more like summer over most of Minnesota. The latest European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model run suggests seven of the next eight days could reach the 70-degree mark in the Twin Cities.
The latest runs from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Global Forecast System seem to agree on a late September warm up -- after flopping back to a colder regime previously.
A warm and relatively dry run into early October? We'll see.
Stay tuned.