Friday, January 4, 2013

Can you get a January thaw

When it was NEVER frozen??

Next week is going to be NICE-- VERY nice.

This weekend will be seasonable and very nice. Next week will heat up to have some days well into the 60's.

However, a term we used quite a bit last year called a "sudden stratospheric warming" is about under way. What this does is breaks down the polar vortex and pushes the cold away from the north pole. This will be underway over the weekend. Lag time before impact is 10-14 days. So, pattern change begins Jan 15th or so but should take another 5 days or so to adjust to our region.

What to expect??

Hard to say looking 2 weeks out, however if we want decent snow if this pattern comes to fruition this may be our best shot at a wintry couple weeks. The cold air seems to start in the plans and mid west and then build east. Tough call, because the last cold snap was more west based and built east. This seems to have a better set up with what is called "cross polar flow" meaning the air is coming from the coldest regions rather then last time where it wasn't SUPER cold.

Can this fail??

Well, the SSW is a lock. The only issue we can see with these is the cold goes to the wrong side of the globe. It happened last year. However, the arctic oscillation hit -3 in December and it seems to be heading that way again. (stats show that is likely). That should being some cold air to our side of the globe. Next issue is getting the fully into the east coast region-- which should happen, but not till after January 20th.

I will update late this weekend.

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