Winter Is 2/3 Over But Is Really Just Beginning

Welcome to February! The winter has been tame for the most part. February won’t be.

Meteorological Winter is the months of December, January and February. Now that we are into February, we are technically in the “home stretch” of the season. Let’s review what the season has looked like so far and look ahead to February.

TEMPERATURES SO FAR:

Temperature anomalies in December/January

It’s been a mild winter so far here in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. In fact, you have to squint to find ANY cooler-than—average temperatures in North America so far. Was this expected.

Yeah pretty much. Here' was our original winter forecast “most likely outcome” map.

The only significant “miss” with this forecast is up in Canada where there should have been absolutely no blue. The Deep South hasn’t been as mild as expected.

SNOW SO FAR:

Despite the lack of significant cold, it HAS been a reasonably snowy season so far. Much of our snow was in December as January was quiet until the month’s final hours. At the YNG airport in Vienna, we are above average and quite a bit above last year’s total through February 1:

WHAT ABOUT FEBRUARY?

As recently as a week to ten days ago, the overall idea for February was that the month would start fairly mild and then colder regimes would win more battles starting around mid-month.

OOPS.

Now it is obvious that the pattern will be quite cold and stormy for a while as the month gets going. How can a forecast change so significantly?

The pattern in the northern Atlantic has actually been favorable for cold in our region for quite some time. But the atmosphere over the Pacific has not been playing ball, resulting in cold shifts being pretty lame and fairly transient. The BIG BOY COLD has been on the other side of the pole in places such as China and Siberia.

But that’s about to change. Clusters of tropical thunderstorms in a key part of the Pacific (known as the “Madden Julian Oscillation”) will migrate into an important zone. This has effects downstream, such as pumping up a ridge of high pressure off the West Coast of the US. In turn, a trough can really dig into central North America. With the favorable north Atlantic blocking, the stage is set for cold to come and lock in for a time.

This is pretty complicated stuff but always interesting to see how everything in our beautiful atmosphere is connected. Computer modeling, including the heralded European model, have been doing a poor job handling these features in the Pacific, leading to poorer-than-average forecasts in the 2-4 week range across North America.

BIG BOY COLD

After a modest warm up during midweek, a cold front will arrive Friday morning, leading to a blustery and cold afternoon. But that’s just a teaser. The cold that’s coming early next week is easily the harshest of the season and has a good chance at being the coldest weather we have had in a little over 2 years.

If we get below zero it will be the first time since the end of January 2019.

How cold we get at night will depend some on cloud cover. If we get a clear sky and relatively light winds, look out below. It won’t take much of a breeze to create some pretty nasty wind chills. These are model projections but seem reasonable at this early stage of the game.

Given the way the first half of the month looks, it seems reasonable that odds favor the first colder-than-average February for our area since 2015.

I suspect it’ll be a pretty snowy month too.

THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO

The days are getting longer and this week begins the 3 month stretch on which we gain daylight at the fastest rate. Hooray!