January 7th, 2008 was the apex of an unseasonably warm early January weather pattern in the Chicago area. O'Hare airport, where Chicago's official weather records are observed, recorded a record high of 65 degrees that day, just two degrees shy of the all-time high temperature in the entire month of January. Nearby, Gary, Indiana actually hit 70 degrees that day.
While meteorologists were predicting rain and thunderstorms in a pattern more typical of early May than January, no one could have predicted a tornado would accompany the storms.
Weather conditions deteriorated very quickly in the early afternoon as a storm system approached the area. And just before 3:30pm near Poplar Grove, IL, a tornado formed.
The storm moved northeast along a line running just north of Poplar Grove, Capron, Harvard, Hebron, and Richmond, before moving across into Wisconsin and weakening significantly. At its strongest, the tornado measured an EF3, with sustained winds of 136-165mph.
Easily the most iconic visual from the storm was the impact it had on a Union Pacific train that was traveling at the time, causing a derailment and evacuation as the result of a hazmat spill. The video is below, and you may have already seen it before!
Destruction of property along the 100 yard width of the storm was significant, although no fatal injuries were attributed to the storm. Nonetheless, four people were killed in tornadoes as part of the larger severe weather outbreak in the Southern US.
Ground-level view of house northeast of Poplar Grove destroyed by EF3 tornado. (NWS Chicago)
In addition to the tornado outbreak, significant flooding occurred with these storms, especially in the village of Watseka, IL. Less than two weeks later, temperatures were below zero in the area, making efforts to clean up after the floods that occurred south of Chicago very difficult, and a great reminder of weather's unpredictable nature.
This is a cross-post with my new blog Today in Weather History, if you like reading about weather history daily, please consider reading!
Our Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines Map of lines across the world has gotten a ton of views and support from people across all sorts of interests and knowledge bases. For that, I thank you! But I never really explained how I came to find all of these lines. So with that in mind, today's blog is going to go over how to use Google My Maps to create your own maps for people to find and view and criticize. This blog is essentially my love letter to My Maps, as the platform has (thankfully) remained a part of the Google Suite, and I sincerely hope it never goes the way of Google Fusion Tables. Of course, the magic of Google My Maps is that you can create maps of pretty much anything, without having to learn incredibly complex GIS systems and selling your soul to ESRI for a license to use ArcGIS. Google My Maps is incredibly intuitive for building vector data (points, lines and polygons), and to this day, when I am building vector maps for use in ArcGIS, I will often u
The Interstate Highway System is a marvel of engineering, even in spite of its cost. There are over 46,000 interstate miles in the US. Surely, not all of them are necessary. Some can even be considered pointless. A 1958 map of what was completed of the original interstate highway act, which has since been added upon in a significant way. Image: WTTW What makes a highway pointless, especially one built to the highest road standards in the world? It can be length, as many of these routes are only a mile or two in length, but it doesn't have to be. There are quite useful interstate highways that nonetheless very short (I-190 in Illinois and I-238 in California are good examples). Another qualification is the area they serve; many of these routes either don't connect to a significantly populated area, or don't facilitate downtown traffic. And while some of them most certainly do fulfill these criteria; they could do so without being labeled as an Interstate Highway.
As we've done for the States of Illinois , Rhode Island and Florida , we've completed a static map of Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines based on the abandonments, railbanked corridors, and out-of-service lines in the State of Washington. Abandoned/Out-of-Service Railroad Corridors in Washington State, 2021. FRRandP creation in QGIS using Mapbox Streets v10 as a background and state/county lines from US Census data. Clicking on this image will bring up the map in its original size. This data was gathered by us over the last five years and is available on our Abandoned & Out of Service Railroad Lines Map , and where we had missing/incomplete data, we pulled data from the WSDOT GIS Data Catalog , who maintains a shapefile of railroads active and abandoned in the State. Neither ours nor WSDOT's data is completely encompassing however, as there are numerous logging railroads that have not been mapped, many of which have little/no traces left, similar to our map in
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