The weekend was beautiful ... but snow could come Friday
Nov. 7—David Mensing, of Elgin, squared up to putt, reveling in the moment: the warmth and the autumnal surroundings. It was all the more special, because it may have been the last gasp of "bonus summer."
"You feel like you're cheating Mother Nature this time of year. It's all a bonus," he said during an outing Saturday at Soldiers Field Golf Course.
With temperatures nosing into the 60s, Mensing was celebrating nature's gift with one of his last outings to the links. Fallen leaves and lengthening tree shadows stretched across the putting green, and the 67-year-old basked in the not-too-warm, not-too-cool temps.
"It's comfortable. You don't get overheated," he said.
Mensing has been golfing every day this month and expected to be out on Sunday at the cost of missing the Vikings' game.
Rochester's weeklong forecast shows temperatures hovering in the 50s, before beginning a tumble on Wednesday and — dare we say it? — bringing the possibility of the area's first snow on Friday.
"We're way above normal right now," Kathy Zapotocny, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wis., said about the area's temperatures.
"And we actually continue above normal for the first part of the week. And then we do have a storm system coming in toward the end of the week. So there's a pretty good confidence that we will drop to below normal by about 10 degrees for Friday," she said.
The storm system is currently projected to arrive Thursday night or Friday before the cold weather hits, and the combination could lead to snow. Or, then, it might not, since the chance of rain is about 30 percent right now.
"We're just saying the impacts are to be determined yet," Zapotocny said.
But winter appears to be cranking up. Once normal to below normal temperatures arrive later this week, they are expected to stay that way until the first week of December.
"We are leaning toward below normal temperatures for that period," she said.
