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Edmund Fitzgerald
Mon Nov 14, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
November 10th of this year marked the 30th anniversary of the storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, immortalized in song by Gordon Lightfoot. Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook.
A few National Weather Service forecasters, using today’s computer models, have run simulations of that blizzard. Tom Hultquist was one of them.
Back in November, 1975 the Edmund Fitzgerald, which was a very large ore carrier of the day, over seven hundred feet in length, departed Superior, Wisconsin. That storm moved northeast of the lake on November 10th. During that time frame, the Fitzgerald was traveling southeast across the eastern part of Lake Superior, heading toward Sault Ste Marie. On November 10th, around… shortly after 7 p.m., the Edmund Fitzgerald sank with all hands on board.
What we saw on our simulations was basically around the time the Fitzgerald was lost, the worst wind and wave conditions were essentially co-located with the general position of the Fitzgerald at that time, where we had a large area of storm-force winds of 50 knots with, you know, in the simulations, at least, we had, you know, localized areas of winds of 65 knots, which is basically hurricane-force. And the wave height simulations showed wave heights in that general area of 25 feet.
Why did Hultquist run the simulation? Part of it was as a teaching tool, but also: sort of just increase the familiarity of how severe things can be out there, and then put a human face on it by associating it with an actual event… in the grand scheme of things, this particular event, was not climatologically rare by any means.
BY: So the witch of November is still out there?
TH: That’s definitely the case, and obviously we coming right up on that season now.
The Weather Notebook is supported by Subaru of America.
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