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Milwaukee weather8/3/2023 ![]() Milwaukee grew fastest around its lakefront, and some of its most expensive homes-in the years before central air and heating-were built along the lake. This so-called “lake effect” helps ameliorate both the hottest temperatures in summer and the colder temperatures in winter-at least for those living within about a mile or mile and a half of the lake (the effect dissipates as you go west). “Lake Effect” is also the name for the Milwaukee arts and culture show produced by WUWM, Milwaukee’s NPR station. So much so that “ Lake Effect” is used as a name for both a smooth jazz musical group and a punk band (one of the latter’s songs is “Great Lakes Powerviolence,” which sounds just like what it seems-no, you don’t need to listen to it). We take pride as well (good Midwesterners that we are), in Lake Michigan’s moderating effect on the weather. “See? See? We have nice weather here, too!” And so our Facebook feeds are filled with photos featuring gorgeous sunsets and armadas of cumulus clouds stacked and drifting across cerulean skies. The poster reads, “Wisconsin Winter Magic.” And then one of the angels concocts a plan to get them out of their particular hell, which is Milwaukee. Just to remind us this is Milwaukee (the scene was actually filmed in Pittsburgh), someone is selling cheeseheads in the background, his stall labeled “Cheesehead Country.” The camera pans past the lower part of a poster as the angels Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck) walk past it. Over their shoulders, it is nothing but grey out the windows. In the Kevin Smith film Dogma, two angels kicked out of heaven are condemned to Milwaukee. I don’t know how often I’ve been told by people who call one coast or another home (and who’ve never been in the Midwest except to change planes in Chicago) that it must be hard living in a place where evidently the sun never shines, where it is grey all the time, as though the weather itself was in cahoots with our bleak, fly-over lives. Given the Plains to the west, there is nothing, it would seem, during the winter to stop the wind and the cold fronts they bear from the mountains of Colorado or from Canada (those famed “Alberta Clippers”) that ram snow, wind, and cold through Milwaukee with eye-watering force.ĭie-hard Milwaukeeans will offer up that such weather “builds character,” and chortle at those stunned by winter’s casual brutality, but we’re also fiercely defensive of our everyday weather as well. Jokes are told: “There are only two seasons in Milwaukee-winter and road construction” (or its variation, “winter and a period of decidedly poor sledding”). New arrivals, particularly from southern or western climes, are astounded by the wardrobes they must acquire to get through the winter-flannel, down, wool, sweaters and fleeces and overcoats, gloves, scarves, hats, boots, and the endless layering that must go on before you set foot outside. When people move away, they usually cite the cold and the (to them) unending winter. ![]() Derecho winds and tornadoes recorded over 110 miles an hour, knocking down trees and powerlines, casting whole neighborhoods into darkness.Ĭertainly the weather extremes are what we remember, what we talk about in Milwaukee. Blizzards that take days to dig out from and that everyone talks about for years afterwards. Floodwaters so high people post YouTube videos of wading chest-deep down Oakland Avenue. We take great pride in our extremes, filling up our social media with screenshots of brutal temperature recordings on our weather apps and pictures of cars buried in snow drifts. ![]() I’m reminded of an old song by John Martyn, “Bless the Weather.” It’s a love song of lament-the refrain noting that what the weather giveth, the weather taketh away: “Bless the weather that brought you to me//Curse the storm that takes you away.” For Milwaukeeans, the beloved and the cursed IS the weather. Milwaukeeans love to boast about their weather almost as much as they love to complain about it. ![]()
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