Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
TOURISTS TREK onto the ice of Lake Superior on Feb. 2, 2014, during the coldest year on record for Ironwood. In contrast, there's mostly open water on the lake this winter.
MARQUETTE - While headlines over the past two weeks point out 2014 was the warmest year on record in terms of global temperatures, Upper Peninsula communities posted some of their coldest readings in the past 110 years.
A northwest flow of air and numerous cold air masses from Canada "were frequent visitors to the upper Great Lakes," said Kevin Crupi, of the National Weather Service's Marquette office.
He released a 2014 summary of readings from weather stations across the U.P.
Ironwood's average temperature of 36.4 degrees for 2014 was 3.7 degrees below normal and set a 110-year record, eclipsing 1996.
Crupi said Manistique, Newberry and Iron Mountain also set records for cold weather.
Munising and Marquette had their second coldest years on record, according to the weather service.
In addition to the cold, precipitation 2014 was well above normal across the U.P., although no individual records were broken.
Ironwood recorded 45.13 inches of precipitation in 2014, or 10.2 inches above average. It was the sixth wettest year on record here. The wettest was 53.46 inches of 2013.
The 247 inches of snow that fell over Ironwood in 2014 was a whopping 58.8 inches above normal, and the fourth highest on record. The record is 279.4 inches in 1989.
