Tuesday Morning: 12-18th Target Period Approaching, Arctic Air on Tap, Will Rubber Hit Road?

Good morning. I am going to be brief today as I need to head to NYC to meet clients. I will lay out however a few thoughts that I will drill down on before the end of this week. 

I mentioned in previous posts that December will be a good litmus test for how the rest of this winter will unfold. I say this because when making my winter forecast many of the variables pointed to a cold December with snowfall. The good news is we have a lot of cold air that will be tapped over the next 2 weeks. In fact, it is going to be arctic in nature and by the end of this week everyone is going to fell the big chill.

So to keep things short, I am targeting the 12-18th time period for our first winter event in the Northern Mid Atlantic to New England. 

We have a lot of arctic air what will flow into region..

1st shot is later this week...temps will plunge into the 30s for highs by Friday with wind chills in the 20's. Lows at night will drop into the low 20's. True arctic air..

The pattern then reloads for later next week and we have a 2nd possible shot of arctic air for the following weekend..

So the cold isn't the issue here. A big reason we are seeing this big shots or arctic air is due to something called the Western Pacific Oscillation (WPO). In its negative phase you get high pressure in the northwest Pacific which acts as a hammer to drill down cold air form the pole. You can see this below..

This keeps the cold coming next 2 weeks and very impressive cold to add. So now will it snow? My prediction is we do see the white stuff from north/central NJ up into New England sometime during this period. I am not saying a big storm (some other factors I like to see are not present) but more an episode or two of light to moderate snow before this period (12th-18th) ends. 

GFS still is trying to bring a wave through with some snow Monday..

I will continue to watch this closely. It will not take much to make this have a little more juice.

Following this you can see we have an active train of moisture/waves that will try to move through the area throughout my target period..

We will need to watch each one of these x's closely to see if any of them try to amplify which would cause a bigger storm to form.  In any event, I like how this lines up with my winter forecast snow areas...

There is a reason I have NJ cut off from average to above average and New England in well above this winter. NJ will have a lot of back and forth weather (rain/mix/snow). I think this upcoming period will start to show that. 

So lets see how this plays out. With the cold air coming any snow that falls might just be able to stick around a while for the Christmas season. 

If the month ends and none of these ideas play out then I will be the first to admit it. At this time I am confident they will. 

More on this before the end of the week.