Welcome to Winter 2024-2025

 

The Winter Solstice arrived at 4:21 this morning.

The surface and radar charts show, the Coastal storm pulling away toward the Maritimes, with an Arctic high building in, Lake effect is falling downwind of the Lakes, with lingering snow over New England behind the departing storm. The Lake and coastal snow will wind down tonight.

Tonight the winds will calm, and temperatures will become very cold tonight. Temperatures won’t recover much tomorrow. The region should generally be tranquil tomorrow into Monday. Then Monday night a clipper currently over southern Alberta, will approach, this will move through on Christmas Eve, bringing blustery winds  and widespread light snow to parts of Pennsylvania, New York State and Northern and Central New England into northwest Connecticut. With a mix over southern Pennsylvania, across southern New England, southeast New York State into Long Island and northern New Jersey.  A mix/rain south of there.

So far, this winter has featured a Pacific strong jet stream dominating the North American pattern. This is due to the well above average SST in the northern Pacific, and the cold air up over a large part of northern Canada

A strong shot of arctic air is descending on the region.

Here is a look at the 2-meter temperature anomaly, showing the arctic airmass over the region.

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There won’t be any big storms over the next 5 days, but a clipper coming through Monday night and Tuesday will bring some snow to parts of Pennsylvania, New York State and Northern into Central New England.

 

This will be followed by a warmup. Then a pattern change looks to bring back the troughing and colder air over the eastern CONUS. I’ve been talking about this pattern for quite some time. I want to show how the pattern looks to trend on the Models. So this shouldn’t be a huge surprise.

 

 

 

Past Christmas we look to have very strong high pressure over the eastern US and Canada, this will allow for warm air transport into the Northeast.

 

 

The 2 meter 5-day temperature anomaly shows the CONUS has plenty of above average temperatures past Christmas.

 

 

 

Looking past Christmas, we can see a high-pressure ridge over both the eastern US and  Canada. The 850mb temperature anomaly is showing warm air over most of North America, with a dome extending up over Canada.

 

 Long Range

This deals with looking at how the pattern looks to set up, and general model trends

 Looking at the EURO extended range, we can see the pattern flipping back to a ridge in the west and a trough here in the east.

 

The GEFS is showing the same general trend, with cold air returning to the eastern CONUS.

 

 

So, for the first half of January, the jet stream pattern looks to support a deep trough over the eastern CONUS. It also looks to support a good chance for cross polar flow events. That could make the first part of January very cold.

During this period, the pattern should stay very active, so we should be seeing more snow events. 

Based on how the pattern looks to evolve and the trends that seem to be setting up. Once we get into the 2^nd half of January, the pattern looks to flip again to one supporting troughing in the west, colder air over western North America, with more in the way of a zonal flow (west to east) and general ridging over the eastern third of the CONUS. If this does happen, then the 2^nd half of January would see more in the way of milder conditions for our region.

My winter outlook laid out the same up and down pattern we've seen so far. A look at the next 4 to 6 weeks, shows that theme looks to continue.

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