I’m reminded of a few evenings on Lake Superior when the sky and water blended into an otherworldly blur.
Category Archives: Weather
Full rainbow
The world could use a bit of luck. Or hope.
Lake Michigan moods
I’ve retired my old Lake Michigan moods post and am replacing it with this slightly newer model that may be updated from time to time. These photos were taken by an assortment of iPhones, iPads, and cameras over the years, not always at a high resolution. In some cases I haven’t found the originals. They’re mostly from my living room window, with a few from my office window and even fewer taken at other places, like Michigan City, Indiana.
They illustrate the many moods of the only Great Lake that runs north-south, with Indiana and Michigan to the east and Illinois and Wisconsin to the west. The clouds range from bright and fluffy to dark and menacing with everything in between, including odd mixtures of types. There are fog monsters and rainbows. There’s lightning caught with a webcam. There’s sea smoke that rises on the coldest days (“Lake Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams,” writes the legendary Gordon Lightfoot). There are ice and snow. There are blues, purples, pinks, greens, oranges, and nearly every color of the rainbow — and I’m not even focusing on sunrise photos (that’ll be another set).
There’s calm. And sometimes there’s calm followed by terror, like the June 30, 2011, hail of hail that devastated the Garfield Conservatory and left me a gelatinous mess.
Thunderstorms and “spring is coming” sky
Yesterday’s short-lived ice “storm”
“Storm” seems a strong word for the quiet calm of an accumulation of ice, even when there’s a trace of precipitation still coming down. I must remember to look up the ice storm in western New York that shut the area down for a day or two. It was beautiful, quiet . . . and destructive.
Sea smoke on Lake Michigan at -21ºF
It got colder this morning before it got warmer. The sea smoke was curling and eddying in interesting ways.
Sea smoke
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams
Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
I love this lyric and use it every time I see sea smoke on Lake Michigan. Temperature at 7:05 a.m.: -2ºF.
Update 1/26/2019: With 2x video for movement until sunrise.
Sea smoke on Lake Michigan
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams.
Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
Today’s sea smoke at Promontory Point in Chicago. Temperature: -9ºF.
For every rainbow, there’s a storm
Bob Newhart’s dreary 1970s Chicago
In the credits and the background of The Bob Newhart Show, Chicago is invariably dreary, with uniformly gray skies. It’s as if the show were set in a perpetual early winter, after the autumn is bright with color and before the winter is bright with snow.
This is how Chicago really looks in spring and parts of summer:
or this:
and, all right, occasionally this: