The Early Days

There is a winter weather advisory for Mason-Lake-Osceola-Clare-Oceana-Newaygo-Mecosta-Isabella-Montcalm-
Gratiot  counties  until 11am.  Occasional light freezing rain or drizzle, as well as areas of dense fog. The ice will result in very slippery conditions on untreated sidewalks, roads and bridges, including during the morning commute. A light glaze is expected.

I thought this would be a good time to give y’all a bit of history about how I became an amateur meteorologist and proprietor of this site.  I am not a professional by any stretch of the imagination, I have no AMS certifications.  My certifications are all in computer technology.  My job in the real world is a procurement specialist in the engineering department of a global pharmaceutical company (for over 35 years).   Due to security reasons I can not go into much depth except to say it has been a great job which I will be retiring from soon.

I took an interest in the weather quite a long time ago before computers when data was kept on paper records.  I had the old rain gauge and a huge calendar and a notebook to keep track of the daily weather.

I bought my first computer in 1990 – it was an old Tandy TRS80 (to the left) which stored data on a tape drive.  In those days one had to be a programmer using Basic to make anything happen.

There was a slot on the right side of the computer to plug in games.  When you turned the thing on all there was was a blinking cursor waiting for your input.  The computer was plugged into a TV to use as a monitor.

I moved through the ranks of the 086xt which stored data on 5 1/4 inch floppies then on to the 286, 386, 486 and Pentium computers with various versions of DOS then Windows.  Back in the early days a large hard drive was 30 megabytes.  Keeping up with the technology and troubleshooting the weaknesses of Windows caused me to take classes over a couple years to get certs in repair and troubleshooting the idiosyncrasies of the beast they call Windows.  I built a couple tower computers then moved on to setting up Linux workstations.

For those of you who have Macs, they used to be built on top of Linux.  I have a couple Linux laptops which are more stable than Windows which I use for storm tracking with my weather station along with my Alienware laptop which I use strictly for the production and running of this site and for 3D graphics.

Data speed from modems have increased from 2400bps to 100mps over the years – in the early days of social media downloads and uploads were at a snails pace.  The earliest site I communicated on were the BBSs (bulletin board systems) then AOL, MySpace and now Twitter and Facebook.

When WOODTV had their blogs with commentary I used to be a member of Craig James blog then Bill Steffen’s after Craig retired.  When Bill’s Blog removed the ability to comment I talked to him about moving his group to my site, which was a potpourri of many things other than the weather.  Over the past few years I developed what we have here now a more professional weather site with hopes of having educational value.

I have learned a lot over these past few years, much of which would not have been possible without the support of Bills bloggers.  When I retire next year I hope to develop this site to compete with the other weather sites out there.

A special thanks to Slim for his historical posts every Saturday, his diligent poking about for all the data he presents is very informative and much appreciated.

There is a winter weather advisory for the counties north of Grand Rapids which expires at 11am – Freezing fog along with a light mixture of freezing drizzle, light freezing rain and snow will lead to slick roadways in some areas through noon.

The short term period will be relatively uneventful/mild with the main issue being cloud and temp trends as well as fog potential due to melting snow/moist boundary layer. The sky forecast beyond today could be too optimistic given potential for stratus (clouds forming a continuous horizontal gray sheet, often with rain or snow).

A high pressure ridge will continue to bring fair wx into Wednesday night. On Thursday the wx pattern will begin to become more unsettled as light snow and potentially some mixed precipitation develop in an area of isentropic upglide (an event defined as relatively warmer, moister air that rides up and over a thin, relatively cooler, drier shallow layer at the surface over a particular region) mainly over our northern forecast area.

The low pressure system approaching from the west will bring a better chance of precipitation area wide late Thursday night and Friday. Thermal profiles should moderate sufficiently enough across (at least) the southern half of our forecast area for rain Friday. A wintry mix of precipitation is possible across our northern counties. We will need to monitor this system closely as some of the medium range guidance including the 00z ECMWF has now trended cooler as compared to previous runs.

A cold airmass will begin to move in behind that system Friday night and through the weekend. A consensus of latest medium range guidance continues to indicate potential for an even colder arctic airmass to move in next week. However a trend is noted in some of the medium range models including the ecmwf to delay the arrival of the coldest air until late in the week.

Today: Drizzle, mainly before 10am. Patchy dense fog before 10am. Otherwise, cloudy, with a high near 39. West southwest wind 6 to 10 mph.

Tonight: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 36. Southwest wind 8 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph.

Tuesday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 42. West wind around 14 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph.

Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 26. West wind around 10 mph.

Wednesday: Partly sunny, with a high near 33. Northwest wind 3 to 8 mph.

Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 24.

Thursday: Mostly cloudy, with a high near 38.

Thursday Night: A chance of rain and snow showers after 1am. Cloudy, with a low around 32.

Friday: Showers likely, mainly after 1pm. Cloudy, with a high near 47.

Friday Night: Rain showers likely before 1am, then rain and snow showers likely. Cloudy, with a low around 31.

Saturday: A chance of snow showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 35.

Saturday Night: A chance of snow showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 20.

Sunday: A chance of snow showers. Cloudy, with a high near 28.