Postby jimh » Sat Aug 05, 2017 10:57 am
The reference to "the gales of November" coming "early" in the Gordon LIghtfoot song is probably to first ten days or two weeks of the month. Historically the most damaging storms on the Great Lakes have occurred on the dates of November 9, 10, 11, and 12:
--Great Lakes Storm of 1913: November 9, 1913
--the Edmund Fitzgerald storm: November 10, 1975
--the Armistice Day Storm: November 11 and 12, 1940
And just outside of that window, the CARL D BRADLEY sank on November 18, 1958 in an intense Lake Michigan storm.
A retired NOAA meteorologist gave a lecture about 25-years ago at a meeting of the U.S. Power Squadron that I attended. He had collected a lot of water and air temperature data for the Great Lakes, and he noted that the maximum difference in air temperature (colder) than water temperature (warmer) occurred in the period of November 9, 10, and 11. The effect of the warmer water temperature was to feed energy into storms moving across that warmer water, and this was the basis for the intense storms that tend to occur during those particular days of November. He also had calculated that about 80-percent of the tonnage on the bottom of the Lakes sank in the storms that occurred on those days.