Significant snow potential -- halfway through winter, winter arrives

Well, the cold then mild pattern we’ve had this winter is turning cold again.

 

It is very early, but a significant storm is taking shape for Friday and Saturday. The models below are a good guess, but specifics on track and snow totals are impossible to pinpoint this far in advance. I would put high odds on at least a few inches of snow and disruptions to travel I the shaded areas from Friday night through Saturday. It looks like some locations in the Midwest and Northeast are going to be hit by a foot or more in a major winter storm, but again the details are far from set. Stayed tuned for an updated on Thursday as things come into focus.

 

For those of you – and I do mean both of you – interested in the inside baseball of this situation, here goes:

• A couple of weeks ago the upper atmosphere above the arctic underwent a massive warming. The pros call it a “sudden stratospheric warming.” Temperatures at altitude went from about -100F to above zero in a short period of time. That is…not normal. And it pushes all that cold air down toward the ground and south, away from the north pole.
• The poorly-named (and often-misused term) polar vortex is really just a near-constant area of low pressure above the arctic that keeps the coldest air contained within an atmospheric river. When this sudden warming happens that “river” gets distorted and disrupted by the movement of the cold air.
• Chunks of that bitter air start floating across the planet toward places that normally wouldn’t be so cold. This time, there are three distinct “lobes” of cold air – think of them as icebergs floating in a current. The biggest one has been hammering Europe for about a week. A smaller one is about to descend on Canada, the U.S. Midwest and the U.S. Northeast.
• The arctic has already recovered to “normal” – i.e., the river of air containing the coldest air above the polar cap has reformed. But we still have to wait for those “icebergs” to float along and dissipate, which will take another 7-10 days, roughly.
• It does not, for now, look like this will persist into February, but stay tuned on that.

 

Also, for football fans and/or degenerate gamblers, the over/under for kickoff temp in Kansas City on Sunday is about 4.5 degrees F. It could well be below zero at some point during the game, among the coldest NFL games ever played.

 

 

 

 

 

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