The Wind Advisory ended at 4 pm Thursday.

The Advisory was generally south of a line from Manistee to Saginaw Bay. It was for steady southwest winds of 25-30 mph with gusts up to 40-50 mph.

The Advisory also covered most of the state of Indiana, northwest Ohio and much of northeast tIllinois.

Gale Warnings continue in effect until 4 pm (Wed.) for Lake Michigan. This is for wind gusts to 35-45 mph and waves increasing to 5-9 feet.

This (above) was the U.S. Hazards Map as of Wed. PM. The tan color showed Wind Advisories, which extend from Lower Michigan south to central IN and OH. There was a Blizzard Warning for parts of western Minnesota, southeast North Dakota and northeast South Dakota and there were Winter Storm Warnings (in pink) and Winter Weather Advisories (in purple) from Arizona to Lake Michigan. Those will be extended across Lower Michigan later today.

Here’s the weather headlines for today – Windy and turning cooler with temperatures falling from the upper 40s to the low 40s.

Here’s a look at high and low temperatures thru the coming weekend. Friday will definitely be the coldest day of the next 5 days.

This graphic shows the percent chance of 4″ or more of snow tomorrow and the 2nd graphic on the right is the % chance of freezing rain. This storm could create slippery roads across the entire area with the greatest impact northwest of a line from S. Haven to Saginaw.

Yesterday (2/14) was also the anniversary of the coldest temperature ever in Grand Rapids – a bone-chilling -24F in 1899. Check the next thread I wrote for details on the famous cold wave of 1899.

We have a crescent moon now.. You can see roughly 34% of the moon now. The moon is approximately 231,255 miles from the Earth. If you could drive to the moon at 55 mph (assuming earth-moon distance of 231,255 miles), it would take you about 175 days of continuous driving to get there.

Here’s two pics. taken by me just after sunrise Tuesday morning. Much of West Michigan woke up to some frost and we had do scrape some frost off the vehicles this AM. You can see a lot of blue sky and a couple of jet contrails. Over the past 4 days, we had 86% of possible sunshine! For the first 14 days of February, we had 60% sunshine (compared to 11% sunshine from Nov. 30 – Jan. 31).

Seven of the last eight days, we’ve had high temperatures in the 40’s with one day reaching the 50s. The month of February is running 5.4 degrees warmer than average. We had 1.16″ of precipitation during the first two weeks of February. February is on average the driest month of the year in West Michigan. The average high temperature for 2/14 is 33 deg. We were 20 degrees warmer than that Tuesday afternoon.