Mild Air Lingers This Week...But Pattern Change May Be Ahead
The mild air just keeps coming! A warm front stalled over NH early this morning is keeping some cool air in place around dawn...along with a few early morning clouds & fog. Low pressure is tracking up through the St. Lawrence river valley. This will provide warming SW winds with increasing sunshine. Today we will see temps around 10-20 degrees above normal. Highs will be climbing into the 50's south of the MA Pike...Some areas may approach 60 near RI this afternoon. Holding near 50-52 for SNH.
A dry cold front pushes through tonight with patchy clouds and a wind shift to the WNW. Seasonal air will move in from Canada Sunday with abundant sunshine with highs in the upper 30's and Lwr 40's with building high pressure. The colder dry air will continue to settle in Sunday night into Monday with highs only in the 30's.
Temps & heights start to rise come Tuesday and Wednesday with highs climbing back into the 40's. Upper level ridge on the east coast will help to pump back warmth into the northeast so by Wednesday, highs will climb to 45-50 with some increasing clouds ahead our next weather maker by Thursday.
Strong low pressure will move out of the Gulf and quickly up the coast through New England late Wednesday night into Thursday. This will be a heavy batch of rain and wind which will quickly move through. Rain will be heavy for a time...mostly likely Thursday morning, before pulling away and wrapping in much colder air on the back side in it's departure.
Once this storm leaves, it will cause cold air to empty from Canada onto the Plains and Midwest and midwestern states in its wake.
This time we may be seeing a more sustained cold for the first time from southern Canada into the northern states. This storm may be the one to finally get this winter pattern rolling and open the door for more Arctic air to finally push south. There has been a persistent trough over Alaska locking in the cold air. Once a ridge develops there, the trough will push south with the cold air and likely set up across the northern and eastern states of the US.
Where this cold temperature boundary stops will be critical for the storm track during the second half of January and perhaps beyond into February. This boundary separating the cold from the warm will make for a busier west-east weather pattern. Bigger dips in the jetstream should become more frequent as well. As La Nina starts to shift to more Neutral with the Arctic Oscillation trending towards the negative.These longer wave lengths may soon help spin up larger storms and bigger extremes in temperature for a longer duration.
Still no signs of real blocking over Greenland in the next few weeks...If we can get all this going together we can start talking about some real storms in February perhaps...but for now...let's just take what we can get. After the winter we have seen so far...any sort of change to a more "normal" winter will be considerable.
