A Windy Day on Lake Superior

The Weather

October, 2006 was an extremely windy month on Wisconsin's south shore of Lake Superior (Figure 1). A particularly strong low pressure system dominated the area on October 11th through the 13th. This low was accompanied by westerly sustained winds greater than 13 knots and a maximum gust of 24.2 knots on the 13th.

Figure 1. Hourly wind direction (top), barometric pressure (middle), and average wind speed (bottom) for the Devil's Island Station buoy from October 4 to October 31, 2006. October 13 is highlighted with the vertical red lines.

The Area

On October 13th (a Friday!) I witnessed these winds and the resultant waves at three locations -- Port Wing, Herbster, and Cornucopia (Figure 2). The winds were amazing but the waves were not as large as I had hoped -- probably because the winds were primarily westerly (the Canadian Northeast shore likely had excellent waves). Videos of the conditions at the three locations are shown below.

Figure 2. Map of Wisconsin's south shore of Lake Superior from Port Wing on the west to the Cornucopia on the east.

The Videos

The audio and video quality of these videos is poor because of the strong winds present that day. The wind was extremely loud in the camera microphone and made the video very unsteady.

Port Wing -- 21.8 mb, 7:00
Herbster -- 11.9 mb, 3:51
Cornucopia -- 2.9 mb, 0:57

Caveats

The videos above are fairly low quality to save space and reduce download time.