Northern Minnesota blows rain, temperature records out of the water

If Northern Minnesota’s recent rain had been snow, meteorologist Ketzel Levens said it would’ve been quite the event.

“It would have been feet upon feet upon feet of snow if it had been all snow,” said Levens, who works for the National Weather Service in Duluth. “ ... We probably would have been breaking snow records as well. Yeah, it would have been a storm that completely shut down northeast Minnesota, most likely.”

Instead, some cities got almost half a foot of rain that Levens said set daily and three-day records for the month of November.
 
“Cumulatively, for that kind of Grand Rapids to Hibbing area, you guys saw over the last three days anywhere from 3.5 to 5.5 inches of precipitation, which is a lot for this time of year, and it's a lot for honestly any time of year,” Levens said Thursday, Nov. 5.

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US National Weather Service Duluth Minnesota Facebook page

Daily precipitation records didn’t stand a chance either.

Hibbing set two records within three days.

Most notably, the city saw 2.18 inches of rain Monday. That’s more than four times the previous Nov. 2 record of 0.53 inches from 1992.

Hibbing broke another record Wednesday, when it received 1.21 inches of rain. The previous Nov. 4 record was only 0.68 inches, set in 1993.

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US National Weather Service Duluth Minnesota Facebook page

“I think that also really shows just how much of a jump these precipitation values were compared to what even the previous highest numbers were. We're just off the charts a bit with this event,” Levens said.

Brainerd also set new temperature records on those days. The city saw a daily low of 55 degrees on Monday, the warmest Nov. 2 daily low since the 52-degree record set in 1938. Wednesday saw the city’s warmest daily low for Nov. 4 in more than a century at 48 degrees.

So, is El Niño to blame? Levens said it’s hard to tell.

“El Niño is what we would consider a larger global pattern — kind of affects things on the scales of months to seasons. So, we can't necessarily say El Niño caused this specific low-pressure system that brought this rain,” she said.

A longer trend over the course of months, however, could suggest the pattern is tied to El Niño. And if there’s a trend, the NWS in Duluth is ready to catch it.

Some of the newer data sites in the region only go back around 15 years. But others, like a Leech Lake site, are more than 100 years older, spanning back to 1887.

The data collection is still done mostly by hand.

“We have a handful of automated observations that are in this list of records, but the grand majority of them are actual manual observations taken by a real person. So those folks are going out and measuring the rain in a rain gauge.”

When the weather brings heaps of fluffy snow, they let it melt in their gauges so it can be more directly compared to rainfall measurements.

Levens encouraged those interested in collecting data for the NWS to join the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, also known as CoCoRaHS.

Minnesota is a seven-time winner of the CoCoRaHS Rain Gauge Rally, a challenge each year to recruit the most new network volunteers in the month of April, according to a NWS Twin Cities Facebook post.

Hard frost hit some parts of Northern Minnesota overnight Thursday — in Brainerd, it came more than three weeks after the average date of Oct. 11 — but snow isn’t in store just yet. The next few weeks are expected to be dry and warm with some days reaching temperatures in the 50s — and possibly even in the 60s.

Levens said the region will likely have to wait until late November or early December to see snow.

Stella Mayerhoff is a Report for America corps member, covering Minnesota’s headwaters region for KAXE in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Report for America places talented journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and regions.