A blast of Arctic cold air is descending on a large span of the country this weekend, and Wisconsin residents can expect bitterly cold temperatures to linger into the middle of January.
The National Weather Service is forecasting the coldest air of the season.
Nathan Lynum, meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Duluth, said that’s being driven by cold air bottled up in Canada that’s funneling through the Northern Plains into Wisconsin and much of the nation.
“The coldest air mass is definitely over the far north central part of the U.S., and obviously including our portion of the Northland here,” Lynum said. “We’re going to be looking at this really impacting states even further to the south, down into the lower Midwest, into the Appalachian region and over into the kind of interior northeast region as well.”
Temperatures are slated to drop 5 to 15 degrees below zero across northern Wisconsin with wind chills of 10 to 20 below on Friday night. Low temperatures are expected to be 10 to 15 degrees below normal across the region this weekend.
In southern Wisconsin, temperatures will also be colder than normal, but they won’t be terrible, said Marcia Cronce, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Milwaukee/Sullivan Office. Cronce said temperatures will hover around 20 degrees this weekend with wind chills that could be as cold as 20 below. High temperatures will dip down into the teens by the middle of next week.
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Colder temps allow for snowmaking
Despite the cold, the state is unlikely to see much snow. So far, the Madison area has seen 9.4 inches of snow — about 7 inches below normal.
“We could see a clipper system here and there that could drop a couple inches of snow. But overall, this pattern is pretty dry and what I call boring,” Cronce said. “With the cold weather, ski areas can make snow. You need cold for that, and you need cold for the ice rink. In terms of some outdoor recreation, the cold air is good news.”
Chris Ruckdaschel, executive director of the Hayward Area Chamber of Commerce, said snowmaking is underway at Mt. Telemark Village in Cable where the American Birkebeiner Ski Race is held each year.
“It’s wonderful up there — the skiing that can be had right now,” Ruckdaschel said. “It’s really quality stuff, and we’re thankful for that because we just don’t have enough of the natural stuff yet.”
Normal snowfall for the Hayward area is 22.7 inches for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service. So far, the area has received 10.3 inches. Even so, only a trace to a couple inches remain in the face of warm weather and rain that has prevented Sawyer County’s more than 600 miles of snowmobile trails from opening. That’s put a damper on winter tourism over the holidays, but Ruckdaschel said they’ve seen groups travel to the area to run ATVs or UTVs on trails.
“That’s the positive, but we still are really anxiously waiting for more snow to get snowmobiling started in earnest,” he said.
The lack of snow comes after Wisconsin saw its warmest winter on record last year. A 2021 report from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts found that winter has warmed twice as fast as other seasons in Wisconsin. It found winter precipitation has increased 20 percent since 1950 as weather in the state has grown warmer and wetter. In the winter, precipitation falls more frequently as rain or freezing rain rather than snow.
Despite the lack of snow, firefighters in Eagle River are hoping the cold holds long enough to build their annual ice castle. Weather permitting, Eagle River Fire Chief Michael Anderson said the tourist attraction has been a tradition for the nearly all-volunteer department since 1933.
“We have all the snow and the trails in the winter, but we do struggle sometimes in the winter to bring tourists to our town,” Anderson said. “We just do it for the community as an attraction.”
Anderson said the Eagle River Fire Department spends about 700 hours over 5 days hauling 2,000 blocks of ice cut from Silver Lake. From there, the blocks are hauled into the city, and the castle is built near its historic rail depot. The castle is about 50 feet long and 26 feet wide with a tower as high as 28 feet.
Anderson said the castle can draw thousands of visitors each winter. His crew of 32 firefighters was unable to build it last year due to warmer weather, but he’s hopeful that ice will hold with the oncoming cold front.
In southern Wisconsin, the popular Ice Castles in Lake Geneva won’t be seen this year regardless of the weather after organizers announced they wouldn’t return last fall.
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