By Steve Weisman

(photo by Steve Weisman) Oh, so close. Although a windrow of sand and zebra mussel shells is holding the water back, waves from a good northwest wind will quickly blow that out. Less than an inch to go as of Sunday morning.

I’ve always been infatuated by the weather. That’s one of the reasons I have found living in the Midwest to be so interesting. It’s like you never know what’s coming next. There have always been wild swings and records, whether it is a snowstorm, a huge rainstorm, a record high or a record low…those were kind of expected.

However, in the past couple of years, the extremes seem to come more frequently. The storms we have experienced rumbling across from the Dakotas and Nebraska have come with much greater intensity.

Now, instead of looking for a thunderstorm, I almost dread it, knowing that somewhere in the region, maybe even right here in the Iowa Great Lakes, we may experience incredible devastation.

Before, I would watch the weather radar and look at what would be coming in the next hour or two and stay glued to the radio/TV for updates. Sadly enough, I think our time of weather extremes is going to now be part of our every-day life! When people talk climate change, I really think that these extremes in weather are part of our ever-changing planet.

Iowa Great Lakes runoff

We have been watching our lake levels for months. Big Spirit, of course, was over two feet below the spillway as we went into spring, while the Okobojis were more stable and have been just below or just above pool level. As always, the word in April was just how impossible it would be to get the lake back to spillway level. Well, 10 weeks later, guess what!

Slowly, the levels on Big Spirit began to rise. Rainfall north from Minnesota was a big factor in this. Once Loon Lake began to flow into Big Spirit, the lake continued to fill. Now, after the last two big rains on Tuesday, July 6 and Friday, July 8, as of this past Sunday, the lake was 0.1 inches of reaching the spillway.

Meanwhile, the Okobojis had risen to 6.6 inches above the Lower Gar overflow before beginning to fall by Sunday morning (6.1 inches. Plus, the Little Sioux River was out of its banks.

The rise in water on Big Spirit has most certainly caused issues with lake home owners, and they have had to raise docks and hoists. Some have had to do this more than once. We all know what happens on Big Spirit when we get winds 30 mph. So, I hope everybody has gotten their docks and hoists at a safe level.

Will it continue? Who knows! A year ago, the rains stopped, and led to several months of little moisture. Will it be that way this year? Who knows! Mother Nature is definitely providing weather that we aren’t used to experiencing. Definitely a time of weather extremes!

As my dad, an old South Dakota farmer who experienced the dirty 30s, always said about the weather. “All you can do about the weather is talk about it!”