Temperatures will moderate lower after Wednesday, but things will still stay quite mild for the next 7 to 10 days. For New England mountains, there still can be a few snow bubbles mixed in with this warmer air.
The big story is a impressive pattern that will develop as we get into the 1st two weeks of March...
The pressure pattern over Greenland and eastern Canada will really change during this period. We will get blocking high pressure over Greenland which will help pool up and lock in cold air along the east. Any energy that moves into the east will have a good chance of getting slowed down and consolidated causing the chance for a storm or two to develop. This is called a -NAO pattern.
I do not expect very cold conditions with this pattern, but it will be cold enough to snow if a storm does develop.
The first time frame to watch will be from February 28th to March 5th for a storm.
Lets see what happens, winter is very close to the end but the atmosphere is setting up to give us the chance at one last hurrah.
More to come.
Cool !
ReplyDeleteHey Willy -- yea, that is really an impressive strat temp spike over the Arctic, causing the upper polar vortex to split and dance over Canada and Eurasia. And yea, the NAO projections go very negative into early March, along with the AO -- the sudden strat warming effect reaches the tropo. Just what you've been waiting for all winter long!! The last dance for winter 17-18, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteBUT . . . it is getting late in the game, the temp forecasts for early March here in NNJ aren't all that cold -- lower 40s by day, upper 20s by night. I don't see any days entirely below freezing, or highs much below 40. So maybe there's a 12-16 hour window each day for big snow. You finally have the Arctic dynamics that you want, but now the Pacific is backing off. The PNA is negative and forecast to stay below 0 for a while, the EPO bounces around 0, and the MJO is about to come out of the favorable zone and plunge back into the neutral zone by early March. Are we going to get the powerful southern jet that can synch with the twisty northern jet and generate some good Noreasters? Maybe, but no guarantees from what I see, FWIW. And even up in the Arctic stratosphere, the wind forecasts indicate that zonal flow will be back over the Arctic in about 10 days, and the upper vortex will settle back over the pole.
Just sayin', looks to me as though a number of things are going to have to go just right to get a real snow storm here in NJ in March. Stranger things have happened. This is when the whole WX game gets really interesting (kind of like college basketball); by mid-April, it's like, wake me when hurricane season starts. But it could be a busy tropical season if that La Nina hangs around for a while. Jim G