Monday Morning Weather Discussion: Eyeing December Weather Pattern and Overall Winter Evolution

Good morning everyone. I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving weekend! Now that the workweek has started lets turn our focus back to the weather. I wanted to follow up on some of my thoughts from last week but first lets reviews the weather highlights this week.

• Decent late fall day today with mostly sunny skis and temps in the high 40's
• Rain then moves in for Tuesday and Wednesday as a frontal system approaches
• This could linger into Thursday morning.

• In the wake of this rain the end of the week will feature seasonable conditions with temperatures in the high 40's to low 50's this weekend.

So moving back to the December weather pattern, lets review what I expected in my winter outlook back in October. Below was my projection for the jet stream flow for December...

The next image below is model projections for the first week of December..

Although not perfect the main theme here is that I was not calling for a cold December in my winter outlook. The most recent model projections do not look far removed from the general ideas I had in October. Notice all the blue Greenland and in Alaska in both images. That will need to change in order to get us into a true winter pattern. Until then we will have a lot of back and forth weather as I mentioned last week.

So how should this evolve as we get to say late December or January? Well going back to my winter outlook here is an idea of what January can look like..

As you can see this image looks much different than December. We have  the blue over Alaska pulled south (trough of low pressure), and more of a trough or blue colors over SE and Mid-Atlantic. By February it could evolve to this next image..

So what is my point here? My point is that the recent mild weather we have had does not concern me and I have the research I did on this winter to back it up. Of course I could be wrong and the whole winter could be mild, but that is not my forecast. I see no reason based on my observations to go back on any of my original winter ideas. I hope you guys can see how weather patterns do have to evolve sometimes and the images below hopefully show how this evolution CAN happen. It will not be exactly like this but I think the overall theme works out well.

Also, just because December will not be very cold does not mean it will not snow.  I would not be surprised to see some snow on the east coast. I just do not expect the real game to start until we get into the heart of winter. Do not let this current weather pattern fool you. 

Thanks for reading, more this week.