Paul Leischow had his drone up yesterday and sent me a link to the 360º panoramas it captured. Click on the picture below to view both panoramas at Reelmedia.org.
A still frame from one of two drone panoramas. This shows Safety Bay and Rat Portage Bay.
For the first panorama, the drone is directly over Yacht Club Island. Once you connect to Reelmedia, you can let the video pan slowly around, or you can use your mouse cursor to shift the view to any direction and even pan up and down. Use the [+] & [-] buttons at the upper left to zoom in or out.
I made sure the image above includes the (↑) symbol at Keewatin bridge. Once you’re in watching the video, you can click on that to jump to a second panoramic view of the area around the Keewatin Bridge.
Thanks, Paul!
And now, on to the weather. They’ve been promising us threatening us with snow since before sunrise, but there was nothing until this afternoon, and then only a skiff. There is a big storm tracking south of us, and Thunder Bay has had lots of snow, but we’ve been getting off easy so far. We’re more likely to see some tonight or tomorrow, but it looks like it’ll just be flurries. I haven’t seen a Storm Warning, or even a Special Weather Statement.
Yesterday, I talked about how the temperatures should stagger up to around the freezing mark by the end of the month, but I didn’t think to include any context for that. A quick review of our historic records reveals that in a hypothetical ‘average’ year, daytime highs in Kenora would start to rise above freezing around the nineteenth of March.
Of course, there’s no such thing as an average year in the real world, but if you like, we can nod sorrowfully at one another and say that our current temperatures are below average. For my part, I think we can forgive Mother Nature for that after three unusually mild winter months.
Weather forecasts say we should move towards more seasonally typical temperatures in the first week of April*, and that should mean more time above freezing than below. I think we’ll see some rapid change then.
*Cynical grain of salt: when meteorologists can’t see a clear pattern two weeks from now, they seem to lean towards predicting that things will be about normal. The seven day forecast is usually more reliable.
Lake of the Woods Ice Patrol 
The European ECMWF (European Community Medium Range Weather Forecast) has historically always been the best long range weather model. Download the METEORED app which is free & quite good. The model tends to overdue precipitation amounts but their timing is often superior to other models. Temperatures are also quite good.
Louis Legal (retired meteorologist)
Thanks, Louis, I didn’t know about that one!
Amazing drone pics, best yet!