100TH Anniversary of the Great Lakes "White Hurricane" - The Great and Destructive Storm of 1913!

[wxhstn74]

100TH Anniversary of the Great Lakes "White Hurricane" - The Great and Destructive Storm of 1913!

One of the most memorable and rewarding  articles I researched and wrote while employed by the National Weather Service had to do with the unprecedented and destructive Fall Storm of 1913. On this 100th anniversry of this storm, many Great Lakes and Weather Historians still agree that this storm was the greatest synoptic storm in modern history to blast the Great Lakes!

 

http://weatherhistorian.blogspot.com/2013/11/100th-anniversary-of-great-lakes-white.html

[Jonger]

I see the NWS has this posted at a few offices.

[Stebo]

Amazing narrative about the "White Hurricane", that is one of the storms for the region I would have loved to have lived through.

[kerbs]

Thanks Bill. Great history lesson!

 

[hm8]

Thanks Bill. Great history lesson!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgI8bta-7aw&feature=player_detailpage#t=4

 

Different storm....(although it is briefly talked about in the article)

 

good song though

[kerbs]

Different storm....(although it is briefly talked about in the article)

 

good song though

If Lightfoot was writing songs 60 years earlier it may have been “The White Hurricane”

[weatherbo]

One of my favorite songs. I remember as a kid, listening to that song at my family's cabin at the tip of the keweenaw in copper harbor, knowing the Edmund sailed just offshore clearing the northern tip of the peninsula that fateful night.

A hauntingly magical spot.

[DAFF]

I named my son Nolan from one of the sailors on the Edmund. I was watching a documentary on the eve of his birth and the name stood out from one of the plaques from the show. He loves the water and boating too !!

[Trent]

Some great historical photos of the blizzard in Cleveland here:

 

http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm/search/searchterm/snow!jpeg%20jpg!1913/field/all!format!all/mode/all!any!all/conn/and!and!and/order/nosort/ad/asc

 

Would have been an incredible storm. A plastering of wind whipped wet snow. Something not seen too often around here.

 

I like the old auto buried in snow. I guess that stereotypical car buried in snow picture has been a thing for at least a century!

[wxhstn74]

I worked the night @ DTW /WSFO/ the Fitz went down on 11/10/75; If memory servs, Chicago /CHI/ WSFO was reponsible for the lakes forecast of Lake Michigan and Superior. Happened just after synoptic hour /00z/ @ 710 pm in the evening and we heard later that night she was missing on the Lake. Winds around 70 mph were reported.

[michsnowfreak]

What an incredible storm! Great pics of Cleveland.

 

Side note...following that storm, winter was sort of a dud until January.

[Chinook]

I had looked up the Toledo Blade archives on this several years ago.

 

headlines or quotes from articles

 

November 10 1913:

Food runs short as Cleveland lies helpless after gale
Trains stalled in drifts
Transportation and wire service hit hard by storm
Big steamers in distress and smaller craft are broken up.
 

November 12 1913:
Diver tries to learn name of lost vessel, believe it is Regina
Storm is called worst in history of lake trade

[Hoosier]

I wonder how models would perform with some of these biggies if they were repeated today...when would the storm show up, how consistent would they be etc. There's a school of thought that says that the big ones get sniffed out early on but then I think of the false alarms there have been in which something looks big early on and becomes less impressive as it gets closer.

[Chinook]

I wonder how models would perform with some of these biggies if they were repeated today...when would the storm show up, how consistent would they be etc. There's a school of thought that says that the big ones get sniffed out early on but then I think of the false alarms there have been in which something looks big early on and becomes less impressive as it gets closer.

Wasn't this one of the studies they had done at NCEP?  I believe I read that early on in the Reanalysis project (mid-1990s), they ran the AVN(GFS) off the reanalyzed weather info, that is, info from few days before the 1950 storm. This was to see if the model would have correctly forecasted the 1950 Appalachian storm. Note the 1950 storm was an oddball, with similarities to the 1913 storm. I can't remember the exact result, but I believe that they probably could have forecasted the impacts of this storm pretty well from 3 days out. This may have been in MWR (Monthly Weather Review).

[andyhb]

500 mb heights (scale changes) --> 06z 11/9/1913 to 06z 11/10/1913

MSLP (scale changes) --> 06z 11/9/1913 to 06z 11/10/1913

[Roger Smith]

I was working in a forecast office in Toronto during the 1978 storm. Our clients were mostly air quality related so that forecasting the weather in southern Ontario was more or less for our own personal interest and to answer questions from staff. My role in this was at that point limited to plotting maps and gathering data.

 

What I recall about the computer model forecast was that it showed a deep low developing at least 24 hours in advance, but it was probably a little further east than what actually happened. There was a 960 mb contour or center on the map, probably a center rather than a  contour, so that would argue for a solution within 5 mb of reality.  I had the good fortune to be asked to plot up a map for the storm at 12z Jan 26 78 and I still have that map, it shows a 955 mb low over Sarnia moving just about due north, and some of the pressure falls out ahead are quite dramatic (-14 mb in 3 hrs). The arctic cold front sits in a graceful arc running northeast then southeast to lie just west of Toronto to Erie PA.

 

I don't recall what the public was expecting in Toronto or other parts of southern Ontario but I do recall that within a few minutes of getting into work on the morning of the 26th, it became apparent that a historic storm had developed and that it had extreme wrap-around characteristics. It was very amazing to see the reports coming in that indicated 90 mph wind gusts near London ON and arctic air blowing from almost due south across Lake Erie. We were probably expecting more of a Chicago Blizzard type outcome than this extreme wound-up monster low. We had a client in Wawa (on eastern Lake Superior) that we told to expect a blizzard and very strong northeast winds, which I think came as news to them (they normally just got some wind direction and stability data from us).  I have to admit that I was not expecting the building's air conditioning unit to be parked next to my space when I arrived for work. So in other words, the LFM didn't quite anticipate the phasing potential although it certainly deepened the low by at least 30 mb.

 

As to the 1913 storm, one can only imagine how under-predicted that must have been for the Lake Huron region, although clearly the public were expecting strong winds and snow. The link seems to be saying that the author could not locate 500-mb maps, of course if he could, those would have been drawn up by what ancient astronaut theorists might know about, 500-mb maps date back to about 1942. I don't think anyone in 1913 even knew about jet streams because nobody had been up that high in the atmosphere. Forecasting in those days was done by extrapolation of analyzed weather systems and whatever intuition the forecasters might have possessed about development. That was to some extent still true in 1978, computer models at that point were only regarded as very helpful out to about 48h, the 72h prog was viewed with considerable skepticism by experienced forecasters back then, and the 96h product was considered experimental.

 

I imagine that even by 1978 this one would have had at least adequate warnings perhaps 2 days in advance and that possibly most of the ships involved would have stayed in port, but nowadays that would be almost a certainty if that gradient appeared on charts 60-72h in advance which is probably the standard you might expect.

[Trent]

I wonder how models would perform with some of these biggies if they were repeated today...when would the storm show up, how consistent would they be etc. There's a school of thought that says that the big ones get sniffed out early on but then I think of the false alarms there have been in which something looks big early on and becomes less impressive as it gets closer.

 

You can use Sandy last year as an example of a "biggie unusual" event that was handled very well for the Midwest. The far reaching inland impacts were modeled well in advance. Within 4 to 5 days, it was known locally here in Northeast Ohio that we were going to be buffeted by hurricane wind gusts for extended periods of time with copious amounts of rain for days. The models for the most part did not waver much at all the few days prior. In the end, they handled the storm quite well, we had a night of hurricane force winds and CLE ended up reporting measurable precipitation on every consecutive hourly METAR for 70+ hours.

[Hoosier]

Wasn't this one of the studies they had done at NCEP? I believe I read that early on in the Reanalysis project (mid-1990s), they ran the AVN(GFS) off the reanalyzed weather info, that is, info from few days before the 1950 storm. This was to see if the model would have correctly forecasted the 1950 Appalachian storm. Note the 1950 storm was an oddball, with similarities to the 1913 storm. I can't remember the exact result, but I believe that they probably could have forecasted the impacts of this storm pretty well from 3 days out. This may have been in MWR (Monthly Weather Review).

I know something like that was done for the Jan 1978 storm but I'm not aware of it being done for the 1950 one.

[Chinook]

I know something like that was done for the Jan 1978 storm but I'm not aware of it being done for the 1950 one.

 

Original paper regarding NCEP reanalysis. See figure 8

 

http://metosrv2.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/Kistleretal.pdf

 

 

also see this web page

 

https://ams.confex.com/ams/84Annual/webprogram/Paper73168.html

 

In tribute to Norm we repeat the November 1950 reforecasts with the NCEP 2003 Global Forecast System. We will examine the results from the reforecast of the 1950 Thanksgiving storm using the higher resolution reanalysis and current operational forecast model to determine if 1) these model and analysis attributes extend the lead time predictability beyond the 3.5 days established with the first attempt to simulate this storm and 2) if the higher resolution models and related analysis scheme provide a deeper cyclone and indications of the severity with greater lead time.