Latest news, weather, high school sports for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

First, in researching this storm, I received confirmation that you cannot believe everything you read on the internet.  Information from several internet sources state that Ishpeming received a state-record one-day snowfall on October 27, 1929.  I looked at old weather maps for confirmation and found that it couldn’t have happened on the 27^th.  I looked backwards a few days and found an intense storm with a similar track to the big storm of October 20-21, 1989.  Then I checked an old newspaper an found that indeed, “Ishpeming…[was]…Snowed in by Unsual Storm” on October 23, 1929. 

An incredible 27 inches of snow came down in one calendar day.  High winds blew the snow into large drifts despite the fact it was super wet and heavy.  Power outages occurred and telegraph service was out for a long period of time. 

To northeast “down the hill” in Marquette, the storm was judged the “worst since 1913.”  That blow was the devastating Great Lakes storm that wrecked dozens of ships taking over 200 mariners to their death in November that year.  The local newspaper reported “48 hours of almost continuous 50-mile winds” along the Lake Superior shore.  When the storm began on the 22^nd, the U.S. Weather Bureau (USWB) observer wrote it was “snowing and frustratingly cold.”  About 8:30 that night the snow changed to rain and continued all night well into the next day as northeasterly winds picked up and brought milder air in off Lake Superior.  “The wind caused the houses on land to tremble, shake and in some cases to rock” according to the observer. 

The storm developed out of a huge trough that centered itself from the Great Lakes to the southeast south of the Ohio Valley.  On the morning of October 22, 1929, the trough was taking on a negative tilt—a sign of a deepening system (Image 1 above).  The system really wound up into a monster by early the next morning just to our southeast (Image 2).  The low-pressure area that developed out of this trough moved in just the right position to put Upper Michigan in the cold sector of the storm (Image 3).