National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Snow Squalls from the Upper Midwest to Great Lakes; High Winds in the Northern and Central Plains

An Arctic front will bring widespread snow squalls through Friday from the Upper Midwest to the Ohio Valley. Heavy snow rates and strong winds will lead to near-zero visibility and dangerous travel conditions. High winds will continue across the northern and central High Plains through Friday, with wind gusts above 60 mph likely, leading to hazardous travel conditions. Read More >

Overview

A very busy six day period occurred to start the month of August across much of Wisconsin. Multiple days of strong to severe storms resulted in hail, damaging winds that knocked down trees and powerlines, as well as a few tornadoes. The biggest severe weather day and most widespread damage occurred on August 10th, 2021. Near record instability present across southern Wisconsin resulted in a line of thunderstorms that moved from west to east and produced persistent wind gusts of 40 to 60 mph for upwards of 20 minutes. A stronger core of winds was noted from east of Janesville to southern Waukesha, to New Berlin, and then into West Allis. In particular a gust of 77 mph was recorded in Eagle in Waukesha County. Hundreds of thousands of customers across southern Wisconsin were without power and it took multiple days to restore power to all of the impacted customers. We-Energies stated this was likely the largest outage in the companies history and the largest restoration effort they have ever embarked on.

 

In addition to the strong to severe storms this stretch of active weather brought some much needed rainfall to ease the ongoing drought conditions. Much of southern Wisconsin entering the month of August was between 9 to 10 inches below normal for rainfall for the year. While some locations were able to receive upwards of 8 to 9 inches of rainfall this was not widespread. On average much of Wisconsin received between 2 to 3 inches of rainfall. While that did help portions of southern Wisconsin along the Wisconsin and Illinois border remain in severe drought.

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