The 614cast
Today’s tl;dr
🌥️ Mostly cloudy and blustery, high in the lower 50s.
Forecast highlights
🥶 Sweater weather
Can you believe there’s no sweater emoji? This seems like a tremendous oversight by the Unicode Consortium.
Anywho, we’re definitely in sweater weather mode the rest of the week… especially today. Whatever sunshine we have to start the day will quickly fill in as clouds take over. You can see the cloud cover forecast has us in mostly cloudy conditions for most of the day.
Shower activity should be largely confined to areas closer to Lake Erie.
The limited sunshine will hold temperatures back, and a blustery wind will add an extra chill to the air. Gusts should peak around 30 mph. Even though the high will be in the lower 50s (or maybe mid-50s, optimistically), it’ll feel cooler than that.
Highs stay below average for the rest of the week. Friday morning still has the greatest potential for frost as it’ll be the coldest morning and winds will be lighter.
📊 Today’s almanac
Normal low/high: 43 / 63
Record low/high: 24 (1952) / 83 (195347)
Sunrise/set: 7:50 a.m. / 6:41 p.m.
🪁 Windier months ahead
One of the quintessential features that we imagine for fall is blustery winds, swaying trees and casting leaves through the air… and maybe into our yards, leaving us with the cleanup.
October, though, is not the windiest month. In fact, on average, it’s in the bottom half!
The average wind speed for October is 7.2 mph, matching June, which does not have a reputation for being particularly breezy.
October is a transition time, though. The cool season of November through April hosts the windiest months, with March just edging out January as the windiest.
Something that surprised me is that the average wind direction is still from the southwest to the west during the cool season. Winds with some northerly component happen, of course, but they’re not so prevalent that they weigh the average that direction.
That’s a stark difference from my experience back in Iowa and northwest Illinois, where winter and early spring winds have a much more pronounced northerly aspect.
🌭 For the weather weenies
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Six–seven (Iowa Environmental Mesonet)