Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RALPH ANSAMI
Ironwood — The weekend’s unseasonably mild weather set a daily temperature record.
The reading of 69 degrees for the 24-hour period to 7 a.m. Monday in Ironwood marks a new Nov. 7 high for the past 115 years, according to the National Weather Service office in Marquette.
The beaches on Lake Superior saw quite a bit of activity over the weekend and many boaters got out on the big lake.
“Two cohos and a small brown,” a fisherman said Saturday from a boat that was entering Saxon Harbor, where small boats are able to get out again after the July 11 storm destroyed most of the harbor.
Mosquitoes, ladybugs and flies made a return to the Gogebic Range with the balmy readings.
Considering the all-time low is 11 degrees for the same 24-hour period, it was a weekend to remember.
The 24-hour period to 7 a.m. Sunday produced a high reading of 70, but that was just shy of the record of 72 set in 1975. The low for that period, zero, was recorded in 1951.
The NWS said the average November temperature this year through Sunday in Ironwood was 47.1 degrees, compared to the long-term average of 35.7.
The forecast calls for continued mild temperatures until Friday, when there will be a cool-down, as a high of 43 is predicted.
Kevin Crupi, of the Marquette NWS office, said November of 2001 goes down in the record books as the warmest in the Upper Peninsula. All reporting stations recorded mean temperatures 10 or more degrees above normal that November and Ironwood had 13 daily highs of 50 degrees or better.
November 2009 also featured unseasonably warm weather and monthly average temperatures 6 to 9 degrees higher than normal.
On Nov. 9, 1999, Ironwood reached 72, Crupi said, only 2 degrees shy of the monthly record of 74.
Other warm spells occurred in early Novembers of 1990, 1978 and 1975.
Crupi said the record warmth that enveloped the U.P. during the first week of November in 1975 contributed to the intensity of the storm that roared over Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975, sinking the Edmund Fitzgerald.