Here Comes Indian Summer & A Doggy Delight!

Hey Mike, with Halloween being only 3 days away I thought I would send you a Halloween picture of Willie my sisters Chihuahua and My Rat terrier, Dobby,

Happy Halloween!!
Justin New.....

Thanks Justin, your Chihuahua should have been in Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Willie would have stood out from the hundreds of chihuahua's in that movie. My daughter's and I loved it. It is a must see along with your great picture above. Dobby is sporting a great look too!

Weather Headlines: We are Going from a Dog Eat Dog Weather Pattern to A Doggy Dog Delight!

Lafayette dogs were not the only ones ready for GQ magazine. The Williamsport dogs are all fired up for Halloween! Here is a picture sent in by Sherry Morrison. From left to right you have Gracie, Misti, and Jenny! Those look like the friendliest witches I have ever seen. Definitely those are good witches you see above.

There is no better place to be a meteorologist than Indiana. If you are looking for variety and great weather to track there is no place like home. A good example is this week's forecast when we will go from lows in the 20s and then have highs jump to the 70s within 50 hours like we will see from Wednesday morning to Friday afternoon. We have real Indian summer on the way! Check out the official definition on dictionary.com.

Indian summer:

"spell of warm weather after the first frost," first recorded 1778, Amer.Eng., perhaps so called because it was first noted in regions inhabited by Indians, or because the Indians first described it to the Europeans. No evidence connects it with the color of fall leaves or a season of Indian attacks on settlements. It is the Amer.Eng. version of British All-Hallows summer, Fr. été de la Saint-Martin (feast day Nov. 11), etc. Also colloquial was St. Luke's summer (or little summer), period of warm weather occurring about St. Luke's day (Oct. 18).

The meteorological definition is one that talks about a warm spell usually more than 10 degrees above average after a hard freeze. A hard freeze is when temperatures drop to 28 degrees or lower. In addition, our average highs drop into the upper 50s as we end October. We certainly meet the criteria on both counts.

Yesterday you can see signs of the Siberian Express in the Lafayette sky above. It has charged our way with a strong northwest flow this week. You see the cirrus clouds blowing in from the North. Lucky for us it is not January or highs would have struggled into the teens with lows below zero. It could have been a whole lot worse. At least the early bird voters that went to the polls yesterday did not have to fight up to 20 inches of snow that fell near Utica, New York! We took our own early bird weather poll yesterday of folks ready for a warmer change. Do you want four more months of this? Check out who won below.

It was a landslide and it looks like the majority will get their wish without a doubt. In fact, we have better chances of thunderstorms over the next 7 days than snow. As fast as gas prices are falling the temperatures are rising! At least the colder weather and snow fans got some quality time in before the warmer changes move in. Julie Krizen our reporter from Sarasota, Florida was amazed at the light dusting of snow she found this morning before work. She even made a little snowball. This of course was more like a few squished snowflakes that were the size of her pinky nail, but by Florida standards we will give her credit for making a snowball. This is something she has only been able to do a couple times in her entire life so she actually may have been more excited about the snow than I was which is saying a lot!

I plugged in numbers to the homemade WLFI forecast model and it actually likes lower 70s for highs on Friday. So no more talk of snow for now. Somebody told me today we are the only television station forecasting close to 70 on Friday. This is the way I like it! It is just another reason to watch WLFI and as I always like to say the weather really is much different than Indianapolis and we plug in totally different numbers than they do thanks to our local weather watchers, cloud and wind observations, precipitation amounts, WEATHER BLOGGERS, etc. It is a team effort. We appreciate your trust and viewership. I may run hard in marathons but it is nature that pushes me the hardest and it is what makes this job so much fun!

Our new web-site was launched yesterday that now includes LIGHTNING TRACKER but keep in mind it will take another good week before everything is up and running so the weather ticker will be added along with our paragraph of weather which will include your local forecast focus. For now the 7 day forecast to look at or really believe would be the one on our wlfi.com home page with the nice blue background. The text 7 day forecast on the weather page is not done by us and this will change by Friday when we will manually update it by hand with some text added. It is another example of how the dot.com companies do not work too well when it comes to forecasting the weather. We will also start adding video web weather again ASAP. Please send any other thoughts and ideas or feedback my way so we can truly serve you. You are what really matters. If you are not satisfied either am I.

Have a great day. I am putting the finishing touches on the winter forecast today and will have the latest on how our local forecast will be much different than what is coming out of the Climate Prediction Center. I used some of their thinking as a guide and then fine-tuned it with our local weather data to come up with a much clearer weather picture. We were talking snow before Halloween and got it....now I am talking about a 95% chance of a White Christmas. Our winter is being called a La Nada which means "nothing" but it will have a whole lot of "everything". I will let you think about it and have the dogs chew on it until tonight's newscast. I look forward to seeing you here on the blog first thing on Thursday!