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Ryan Sajdak

@ryan.sajdak

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Science + special ed teacher in Buffalo 🧪 | Army vet | NYS Master Teacher | EdD candidate | Building tools for curious minds → ryansajdak.com

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Tomorrow evening, the waves on southern Lake Michigan are forecast to be 21 feet tall. That's a two-story house, rolling in one after another.
NOAA runs a wave model for all five Great Lakes: 45,000 squares, each about a mile and a half across, forecast hour by hour, five days ahead, four times a day. It's free, so I built a live map of it.

This week it shows a storm passing through Canada pushing a north wind down the full 300-mile length of Lake Michigan, and the waves build the whole way. Lake Superior tops out near 19 feet off Pictured Rocks Friday afternoon. Erie peaks around 11 feet off Cleveland after midnight, and Ontario stays at 8 to 9 feet through the night.

Those are significant wave heights, the average of the tallest third. Single waves can run close to twice that.

The live map updates with every NOAA run: ryansajdak.com/greatlakes/waves/

The storm hasn't started yet, and every wave is already on the map. by @ryan.sajdak

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6 hours ago

No big freighter has gone down in open water on the Great Lakes since the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. Almost every accident on this route since then has happened in a river, a canal or a lock.

This is the whole trip an ocean ship makes out of Duluth with a load of wheat: about 2,200 miles, 16 locks, and 600 feet downhill to the Atlantic at Cabot Strait. At 13 knots with no delays it takes about a week.

The narrow places are the story. Ships built for this route are 78 feet wide and the locks are 80. The channel through the Thousand Islands squeezes to 450 feet, and two ocean ships lost their steering there a year apart, in 2014 and 2015. The seven locks above Montreal close in early January. In January 2026, eleven ocean ships were still above Montreal when the deadline passed.

The deadliest spot on the route is not on a lake at all. It is in the St. Lawrence near Rimouski, where the Empress of Ireland sank in fog in 1914 with 1,012 people.

Modeled in Blender. Ship track from the Army Corps waterway network. Numbers from NOAA's Coast Pilot 6, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the National Weather Service and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. by @ryan.sajdak

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a day ago

Tifft Nature Preserve is a coal port with a landfill on top.

On the 1894 government map it’s the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s coal docks, canals cut through what had been George Washington Tifft’s dairy farm. By 1948 the map shows marsh where the docks were and one canal left. Then it was a dump, and in the 1970s the city hauled in garbage from Unity Island to make it a landfill.

People pushed back. The garbage was sealed in clay and covered with soil (those are the mounds), and in 1976 the rest became the preserve.

The red line is the canal bank from the 1948 map, drawn on the 2024 aerial photo. Lake Kirsty is the canal.

Maps: U.S. Geological Survey, 1894, 1948, 1965. Photo: NYS GIS, 2024. by @ryan.sajdak

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Twice a day, the St. Lawrence River stops at Quebec City and runs backwards.

Here is the whole trip, from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic, colored by how fast the water is moving. About 270,000 cubic feet a second leaves the lake past Kingston this week. It threads the Thousand Islands, goes through the 32 turbines of the Moses-Saunders dam, rests in Lake St. Francis, takes a 15-mile canal to the Beauharnois powerhouse, and hits about 9 mph in the Lachine Rapids at Montreal.

At Trois-Rivières it starts to feel the tide: it slows down twice a day but never stops. At Quebec City, where the river is less than a mile wide, the tide wins, and for four or five hours at a time the water flows upstream at about 3 mph.

Below Quebec it is 30 miles wide and salt. What came from the Great Lakes hugs the south shore as the Gaspé Current, and reaches the open ocean through the Cabot Strait, about a thousand miles from Kingston.

Montreal to the sea is Environment Canada's forecast models for October 11. Nobody publishes one above Montreal, so Lake Ontario to Beauharnois is modeled from chart depths and this week's outflow. by @ryan.sajdak

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Twenty years ago, the snow was already coming down on Buffalo, and the leaves were still on the trees.

This is the October Surprise piling up hour by hour, from Thursday afternoon, October 12, 2006, to Friday morning. The Buffalo airport ended at 22.6 inches. Depew, Lancaster and Alden got 24. Eighteen miles south of the airport, Colden got half an inch.

Where and when the snow builds comes from the National Weather Service radar that night. Every place ends at its measured total, from the National Weather Service in Buffalo and NOAA's cooperative weather stations. The airport count along the way is an estimate from the radar. Snow depth is exaggerated against the land so the shape shows. Modeled in Blender.

About 16 hours of snow, and the last of the power came back 13 days later.

Photos: Jason Safoutin, Wikinews, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. by @ryan.sajdak

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3 days ago

Twenty years ago today, Buffalo got two feet of snow and ski country got half an inch.

The October Surprise started as rain on the afternoon of October 12, 2006. By the next morning the Buffalo airport had 22.6 inches. Before that, the most Buffalo had ever measured from an October storm was 6 inches, in 1909.

Eighteen miles south of the airport, in the hills that usually get the most snow in Erie County, Colden measured half an inch.

Lake Erie was 62 degrees. The band it fed sat over the city and the northern and eastern suburbs for about 16 hours. The leaves were still on the trees, so the first few inches were enough to start bringing limbs down. More than 400,000 customers lost power, and the last of them waited 13 days.

Totals are from the National Weather Service in Buffalo and NOAA's cooperative weather stations. Snow depth is exaggerated against the land so the shape shows. Modeled in Blender. Photos: Jason Safoutin, Wikinews, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sixteen hours of snow, thirteen days in the dark. by @ryan.sajdak

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4 days ago

Niagara County has more toxic waste sites per person than any county in New York.

New York keeps a registry of places where hazardous waste was dumped. 110 of them are in Erie and Niagara counties: 53 in Niagara, 57 in Erie. Per person, Niagara's rate is about five times the state's.

28 are rated a significant threat. The biggest is the old Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, 491 acres.

73 are marked closed, which doesn't mean gone. It means the remedy is in place and the site has to be watched from here on. At Love Canal, 21,000 tons of chemical waste are still there, under a cap, behind a fence.

Nine of these sites made the federal Superfund list. Six have come off it. Erie County has none left.

Every site, with what's in it: ryansajdak.com/superfund

Data: NYS DEC, U.S. EPA by @ryan.sajdak

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4 days ago

You can text a question from no service, over satellite, and get an answer back with live info.

I built a free tool called Talk to the Sky. Text HELLO to 888-887-8002 and save it. Works over satellite on satellite enabled devices.

Link in bio + story today. by @ryan.sajdak

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4 days ago

The Niagara River drops 326 feet in 36 miles, and about half of that happens in one step.

It leaves Lake Erie at Buffalo fast and narrow, squeezed under the Peace Bridge. Then it widens, slows down, and splits around Grand Island. This is the quiet stretch, the part that feels more like a lake than a river. You can swim in it at Beaver Island State Park.

Past the island the two channels rejoin, the water speeds up, and the river goes over the Falls: 167 feet at once.

Below the Falls is the violent part. The whole river squeezes through the gorge at Whirlpool Rapids, then hits the Whirlpool, where it broke into an older gorge buried in the last ice age and turns almost ninety degrees. Past Lewiston it goes calm again and stays calm to Lake Ontario.

That's why the river by Grand Island feels like a lake and the lower river does not let go.

The speeds are computed from USGS lidar and NOAA chart depths, not measured. Live map at the link in bio.

#niagarariver #lakeerie #lakeontario #niagarafalls #beaverisland #grandisland #wny #buffalo #greatlakes #hydrology #scicomm by @ryan.sajdak

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5 days ago

Three Great Lakes drain through a gap less than a thousand feet wide.

That’s the St. Clair River under the Blue Water Bridge at Port Huron. Everything leaving Superior, Michigan and Huron squeezes through it, about 190,000 cubic feet a second, moving about 6 miles an hour.

Then it does the opposite. Forty miles downstream the river comes apart into the St. Clair Flats and empties into Lake St. Clair, which averages about 11 feet deep. The water takes around nine days to drift across it.

At Detroit it turns back into a river. About 70% of it passes Belle Isle on the Canadian side, and below the city about a fifth slips down the Trenton Channel, west of Grosse Ile.

Ninety miles from Lake Huron to Lake Erie, and only about eight feet downhill. The two rivers account for a day and a half of the trip. Lake St. Clair is the other nine days.

The speeds are a computer model built from NOAA chart depths and the USGS river gauges. Where the USGS measures the current, at Port Huron and at Detroit, the model lands within about 7 percent with no tuning. Wind is left out, so the lake shows only its steady drift. by @ryan.sajdak

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6 days ago

Teachers, what do you notice? 🤔 by @ryan.sajdak

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20 days ago

Upgrade to yesterdays project… by @ryan.sajdak

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