Wisconsin Weather Remains 'Wildly Extreme' Through September; One Local's Measurement Methods Falter

WAUKESHA — Statewide news coverage has spent much of this year calling 2026 wild even by Wisconsin standards, and having lived here 34 years and spent most of them outdoors with the Department of Public Works, I'm not inclined to argue with that assessment. What I want to write about isn't the weather itself, though. It's what happens when a private citizen tries to keep his own records of it, and the instruments he's using start to disagree with him.

That citizen is my neighbor Ned England, 70, of Backslide Way, who since July has been running a second YouTube channel called Nedsmokedout devoted to smoke and nature content, separate from his main channel's coverage of hospital speeders and a neighbor's poorly parked Honda. Ned's method for the new channel is straightforward in concept: stand on the pedestrian bridge at Frame Park, count how many lampposts along the riverside path are visible through the haze, and log the number. On a clear day, he tells me, that number is nine. It has been nine for as long as he's been counting.

On September 14th, it was not nine. Or rather, it was nine, and it was also eleven, and Ned was not prepared to say which.

"I counted twice. First time I got nine. Second time, from about four feet to the left, I got eleven. I don't know if that's the haze changing or if I'm the variable now."

— Ned England, Nedsmokedout

A Method Under Strain

I want to be fair to Ned here, because the underlying idea isn't crazy. People pay real money for air quality sensors that do, in more precise terms, roughly what Ned is doing with his eyes and a bridge railing: they measure how much of what's in front of you gets lost to particulate haze. The National Weather Service has its own instruments for this. Ned has a bridge, nine lampposts on a good day, and, as he explained it to me, a mood.

"Angle and mood," he said, when I asked him to walk me through the September 14th reading. "I was standing a little further right than usual because there was a guy fishing where I normally stand. And I'll be honest, Bob, I was in kind of a mood that morning, so I don't know how much stock to put in it." He counted eleven lampposts that day. On a clear day it's nine. He is aware these numbers should not both be true.

I asked whether he'd considered that a genuinely wild weather year, the kind that's been making headlines from January straight through September, might just be producing genuinely inconsistent haze, no mood or angle required. Ned considered this for a moment and said he had "thought of that too, actually," and that it was "one of maybe three explanations he was carrying around."

The Search For A Better Instrument

What's notable is that Ned isn't defending the lamppost method so much as looking for its replacement. He mentioned, more than once, that he's been thinking about switching his severity metric entirely, from lampposts to his son Trevor, who lives at home and whose general disposition, in Ned's telling, tracks reliably with how bad conditions have gotten outside.

"Trevor doesn't need a bridge. Trevor just tells me how it's going, and I write it down, and honestly it's held up better than the lampposts."

— Ned England

I don't have a strong opinion on whether a family member's mood constitutes a valid weather instrument. What I'll say, having spent three decades tracking storm response for the city, is that I understand the impulse. When the official channels are inconsistent, or slow, or simply not built for a resident who wants a daily number, people improvise. Ned improvised with a bridge and some lampposts, and for a while that held up fine. Now, in a year that meteorologists themselves are calling unusually severe, his instrument is telling him nine and eleven on the same morning, and he's shopping for a new one.

The Nedsmokedout channel has three subscribers. Ned says he's not concerned about growing it right now. "I'd rather get it right for the three people who are watching than get it wrong for three hundred," he told me, which I think is a more responsible attitude toward data integrity than most people bring to their Nextdoor posts.

As of this writing, the lamppost count stands at nine, pending confirmation, and Trevor was unavailable for comment.