Happy national weather persons day!

 It's February 5th, which means it's national weather person's day! The day commemorates the birth of John Jeffries, Who was born on this date in 1745. He is one of the earliest American weather observers. Other early observers were Reverend John Holmes, as well as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Jeffrey's began taking daily observations of weather in Boston In 1774. A few years after that he took his first balloon observations In 1784.

 

this weekend recap

The cold air coming in for this weekend is going to be some of the coldest air we've seen so far this winter and will likely rival the arctic blast we just saw. But a big difference is going to be, we will see a lot of strong winds accompanying the Arctic blast over this coming weekend. So wind chills are going to be extremely dangerous and brutal.

Saturday afternoon

Sunday afternoon

Looking ahead

For almost the entire winter The west coast has been under a monster ridge. But starting Over the weekend into next week, We're going to see this ridge pattern start to break down. As troughing starts to build into the west coast and the ridge that's out west starts to move east. Where does the eastern US is going to start to warm up that will include the Northeast. But  due to the deep snow pack and all the ice on the Great Lakes I do think the models are overdoing it on the amount of warmth we're gonna see. But in spite of this We should be fairly mild by the 14th or 15th of February. 

The euro ensemble temperature anomalies

The GFS Ensemble is similar

I still think we're going to return to coolish temperatures during the second half of February heading into march. February as a whole is probably gonna end up With overall below average temperatures.  But there will be a skew to the first part of the month where we've seen all of this cold weather. As we know, over this coming weekend we're going to have another Arctic outbreak. The overall pattern still has a lot of cold; and I think we're not done seeing cold outbreaks impacting the Northeast and northern Middle Atlantic region. The pattern is also looking to remain active with the northern jet and subtropical jet staying active with increased chances for the two streams to phase from time to time.

A quick look at spring

Due to the long duration of these arctic air masses we've been experiencing here The Great Lakes have built up more ice coverage than they have in several winters. 

The amount of ice coverage on the Great Lakes and a heavy snow pack across large parts of the Northeast are going to help keep us on the cooler side of things. Because of these factors It's going to be a slow transition into spring like weather. Spring 2026 is likely to be cooler overall than we've seen in the past several springs. Due to the large deep snow pack a slower melt into later into the spring would increase our flooding risk across the region.

The analogue of 2014 is still the top analogue for the winter of 2025-2026. In fact it is still closely mirroring 2026 as we head towards spring. 2014 saw a major problem with flooding here in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic.  The physical science laboratory's 2014 temperature, precipitation and drought composites show how this spring will likely  work out. The March through May time frame won't look exactly like these but these should give us an idea that overall over the entirety of the spring temperatures will be generally below average and the risk for wide spread drought is rather low.