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A Families Reflections on Southern Wisconsin Weather


My two sisters and I celebrating Easter 2008 with an Easter Snowman
(Photo taken by my mom, I am the one in the blue hat)

Southern Wisconsin has been my home for my entire life and as someone who experiences the weather that comes with this space I feel confident to be able to say My family and I notice and remember any unusual weather. With summers lasting long into the fall, consistently making my first day of school a memorably unbearably hot one, to winters dragging on into the spring bringing snow on easter instead of having a ‘white Christmas’ like my sisters and I wanted, there are lots of memories in my family.

                                                                                                                                
Photos of daily journal entries from Christmas Eve 2015 and Christmas Day 2019 
mentioning lack of snow, and abnormal warm weather
(Credit: My Mom's Journal)

As time passed and I grew older, old enough to pay more attention to these trends and how they would affect my life, my mom and I would modify our growing season for our veggie gardens and battle intense periods of heat and drought in August. My dad and I would have to reschedule our cross country skiing plans, or move them to northern Wisconsin where there was enough snow for our trails. It was becoming very clear to me that the seasons and weather, like I remembered in Wisconsin, were changing.

Temperature and Wind Chills from January 30th, 2019
(Map from National Weather Service)

When I started college in 2018 I had no idea that the upcoming winter would be such a reminder of the changing weather in Wisconsin. To those of you who did not experience this, the end of January 2019 was a historic weather event we call the ‘Polar Vortex’ where temperatures in Wisconsin reached record-breaking cold temperatures (coldest since 1996), and February 1st became one of the longest stretches of sub-zero temperatures on record (National Weather Service). The polar vortex is actually a collection of winds above the north pole, where it contains the polar air in the north. However when this wind vortex is disrupted by increasing warmer temperatures around it, the circulating path of these winds becomes wavy and enters more southern regions, like it clearly did in 2019.

Since 2019 there have been many records of weather considered ‘strange’ or ‘abnormal,’ leading up to Oconomowoc’s June 2022 hail. If I were to make a list of notable weather, it would go on for quite a bit, but I think the most notable part is that people are becoming more and more aware of these changes and the effects of climate change. While Wisconsin weather might remain unpredictable, I am glad to predict more awareness and efforts to curb our world’s changing temperatures.

Oconomowoc High School's Football Field, Graduation Day June 11th, 2022 
(Oconomowoc Enterprise, submitted by Kerry Robins)

I am very glad to have taken this course. Growing up in the Midwest and having enthusiasm for the outdoors had already provided me with a simple background on some ecological issues, but this class deepened that knowledge and asked what I could do with it. The most important piece of knowledge I will walk away knowing is that, there are people out there constantly studying and problem solving our environmental issues. There is lots of effort out there and as a student, but also a citizen of these ecosystems there is more knowledge I can learn, and more things that I can do than I originally thought. It is my goal now to take this knowledge and help share it with others.

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Comments

  1. Gabrielle DevotiJune 19, 2022 at 9:49 AM

    Hi! I talked about a lot of the same things in my post. I too have lived in Wisconsin my entire life and have become increasingly aware of the odd weather shifts. I liked that you included pictures of your diary entries about the weird weather! I agree that the extreme weather is hard for people to ignore, but do you think that makes people really acknowledge that climate change is a problem? Personally, I feel like people have a high capacity for pretending somethings not a big deal. I feel like there's also some risk of shifting baselines. We may quickly get to a point where people just accept the new weather as the norm. I myself was surprised in week 3, when I was reading something about how the Madison lakes used to be clear and not filled with algae. Because growing up here they've only every been murky and gross when I saw them. So, it never occurred to me that they should look any different and I just accepted that they were always meant to be murky lakes.

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  2. Alexis CoffeenJune 19, 2022 at 11:08 AM

    I liked how your post focused on the abnormal/strange weather that has occurred in Wisconsin due to climate change as it showed how climate change is more than just increasing temperatures and precipitation. I remember the polar vortex from 2018 as there were a lot of my classmates who were unable to come to class due to their cars failing to start from the strong cold winds. I agree that there is a lot that can still be learned about ecologically issues but even with the knowledge that we currently have there is a lot that can be done.

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