Daily Archives: May 28, 2024

Memorial Day weekend weather can be absolutely glorious in the state of Wisconsin. But it can be rainy and cold as well. Perhaps no other major holiday suffers such a Jekyll and Hyde split, and there are really good scientific reasons that underlie this duality.

By the end of May, the Northern Hemisphere is just about completely over the prior winter and the cold air that characterized it is almost completely left to very high latitudes, where the longer days act quickly to erode what is left even near the North Pole. The process of “shedding” the cold air from winter sometimes involves the excursion southward of regional cold air vortices in the mid-troposphere, which meteorologists refer to as “cut off” low pressure systems. Continue reading →