We are starting off the week with some dry and chilly conditions. High temperatures were only in the 40s on Sunday. The dry/chilly air will continue. So we’ll only be in the low-mid 40s today and tomorrow.
We have high pressure to our west with a cold front far to our south. Low pressure lies off the coast of Maine.
We’ll have fair skies today with a northwest breeze through the afternoon This will continue to pull down the dry and seasonably chilly air into the region.
If you are doing some traveling today, then most of the country should be dry. However, there will be some showers with a few storms across the Deep South. There will be some snow showers in the far northeast states. There will also be a small strip of snow from Missouri to Minnesota.
Tomorrow into Wednesday there will be a weather system moving from the Rockies into the Plains. It will be a sizable area of low pressure. Due to the flow around the high and the low, the winds over the eastern 1/3rd of the country will start to be more southerly. This will start warming up a lot of areas. We’ll be in the upper 40s to near 50 here.
This is the first day of Winter 2022. We’ll be mainly dry with only a stray shower to our south.
As the low shifts east/southeast it will intensify. There will be a very large/strong trough (dip in the jetstream) moving into the Midwest. By Thursday we’ll have an increasing south breeze. This will pull up a lot of moisture, and it will push the high temperatures back up into the 50s.
We’ll have an increasing chance for rain as we go through the day.
There may be a small area of a wintry mix west/northwest of D.C. but the large area of rain will probably have more of an impact on travel. Heavy snow will be falling over parts of the Midwest.
Rain will continue here Thursday night into Friday. There will be a lot of rain in the region, and it could be a bit heavy at times.
This will make travel tough up and down the east coast. Meanwhile snow will be a problem over the Midwest through the Ohio River Valley.
A couple of days ago it looked like we would have a couple of shots at some snow between Thursday and Saturday. Some of the excellent (sarcasm) meteorologists in the area were posting the typical long-range forecast pics of the foot of snow that we could POTENTIALLY get. Well…. Let’s just say that things have changed. So as of now it looks like we’ll mainly get rain showers. There may be a strip of a mix at the end of the precip Friday afternoon or evening.
It is a race of the moisture moving out and the cold air moving in. The Euro is actually faster and drier than the GFS. However…. I will say this. After the cold front moves through on Friday we’ll have some very cold air next weekend. high temps will only be in the 30s. There will also be a very large trough overhead. So with that setup I’m not going to rule out a couple of flurries on Saturday. It’s a long shot as the surface moisture will be very low, but there might be enough moisture in the mid levels. We’ll see. Also, the models changed dramatically in a 3 day period. They could trend colder before we get to Friday. Maybe the moisture will linger for a while into Saturday. We are talking about 5-6 days out afterall. Stay tuned for updates.
Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler