Yesterday saw the test run of Mother Nature's winter wonderland phase in Muskegon. Yes we woke up to snow which had temporarily overwhelmed the grass, changing things from green to white. Winter is not far off.

October was about as expected for our climate. The average high temperature was 59 degrees. The warmest it got was 73º F on Friday the 15th. The coldest high was on Saturday the 23rd at 44º F.

Low temperature for the month was 28º F on the 27th. Warmest recorded high temperature was 57º F on Saturday of the month's final and warm weekend.

All in all October presented a month of near normal temperature. For the month the temperature was 1.08 degrees below norm.

On the water the average wind speed was 9.8 knots as compared to 7.9 in September. Windiest day was the 23rd with an average of 18.2. The 11th had the low average wind speed at 2.3 knots. Peak gust for the moth was 38 knots on Monday the 25th.

One way in which October's weather was unusual was precipitation. A total of .82 inches fell with a quarter of that on Saturday the 16th. This is off quite a bit from a norm of 2.8 inches. This maybe one reason the water level has continued to fall, the lakes are not being refilled.

Finally, although November has seen the first snow melt away, as recently as 1995 Muskegon received nearly 26 inches of snow.