Chill in the air Friday-Saturday, but a string of 60° temps starts Monday. With El Niño in progress, NASA warns of extra coastal flooding on the western coasts of the Americas.

Starts warming up a little in the afternoon Sunday, but by Monday, a string of 60° temperatures start that could include some mid-60s by the middle of next week toward Wednesday and Thursday

November’s off to a milder than normal start averaging 3.5° above normal. Despite that surplus, the month is running 5.2° cooler than the opening 9 days of November a year ago. The official high temp hit 70 on this date a year ago.

Northwest winds through the atmosphere are circulating chillier air into the Midwest and the Chicago area. Temps Thursday night dip into the upper 20s in normally cooler locations away from the city and Lake Michigan and to the 36 in the city proper.

Coolest days so far this autumn to hit Friday-Saturday

Both Friday and Saturday (Veteran’s Day) are to see temps hard pressed to make 50-degrees —making them the coolest days here since the spell of chilly weather which produced the Halloween snow squalls more than a week ago.

with a collection of 60+ deg daytime high temps commencing with a 60 Monday and surging to the mid 60s by Wednesday and Thursday next week. The mid-week daytime highs (64 Wed. and 66 Thur.) will be well above the upper 40s which are normal for mid-November.

There are signals from an array of models of a wetter and cooler weather regime taking up residence here next weekend. Precip chances, with the exception of some possible late week showers at this time, should remain low.

With El Niño in progress and given a 80% chance of continuing through next spring, NASA warns of extra coastal flooding on the western coasts of the Americas

El Niños involve warming of equatorial Pacific waters—warming which spreads poleward as the cooler months of winter settle in—bring storminess and above normal rainfall to the Southwest U.S. even as prospects for drought increase in the western Pacific in regions such as Indonesia. Drought frequently accompanies El Ninos in Hawaii–already analyzed as in the midst of drought conditions.

NASA notes that strong El Niños—which the current El Niño is given a 55% probability of becoming—have been known to produce instances of “10 year floods” capable of swamping roads and flooding low-lying buildings. The period from January to March has been most vulnerable to such flooding in the past.

Seattle and San Diego are cited by NASA as cities in the U.S. which are particularly vulnerable to such flooding.

Further, NASA notes that rising sea levels mean that by the 2030s, such flooding may occur even WITHOUT El Niños.

It was 47 years ago on Nov. 9 in 1975 that the Edmund Fitzgerald departed Superior, WI destined for Detroit with a load of taconite used in steel production. It never made it.

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald which was over 700 ft. in length and was carrying 26,000 tons of ore when it sunk in hurricane force wind gusts and 25 ft. seas November 10, 1975

The ship would sink, carrying its 29 crew members to their deaths in a mammoth autumn storm over eastern Lake Superior a day late on November 10, 1975. Its remains were found in two large pieces beneath 535 ft. of water days later. In its report on the disaster, the National Weather Service Marquette MI office reported, “The Coast Guard conducted a thorough search in the next several days. On November 14, 1975, a U.S. Navy plane with a special magnetic anomaly detector located a strong contact about 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point.”

Numerical simulations of the storm have indicated the Fitzgerald perished in 25 ft. seas amid 50+ mph sustained winds with likely gusts of 80-85 mph. Modeling indicates the conditions present in the Nov 10th storm could, in rare cases, produce rogue waves topping 40 ft.

A summary of the disaster from the National Weather Service-Marquette, MI office notes that of the 6,000 ships which have sunk on the Great Lakes, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest—729 ft. in length. The disaster was memorialized by the late Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

HERE’S ARE SEVERAL LINKS for more:

#1. From the National Weather Service-Marquette, MI:

#2. From CIMSS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

#3. From the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) with links to the full article which employed computer models not available in the 1975 to recreate the conditions in place as the Edmund Fitzgerald traversed Lake Superior and met its demise:

#4. Wikipedia: