Winter is mounting an offensive.

If you haven’t read last week’s post concerning the Sudden Stratospheric Warming, reading it now would be a good background for what comes next.

The shift toward a major cold trend for the eastern U.S. is now underway.  Today’s cold snap is the beginning and we’re likely to see several more cold surges over the next 7-10 days.  Then, it gets REALLY cold for the latter third of the month.  The primary focus of the cold trend looks like it’ll be over areas of eastern Canada, the Great Lakes and the Middle Atlantic/New England states.  But, there should be a sizable amount left for us, too.

What about snow?

Our first shot at snow will come this weekend.  A weak disturbance moving out of the southwest will stay south of us Fri/Sat.  That will hold the current cold air in place so that any precipitation is likely to be snow.  That should begin late Friday/early Saturday and continue on into Sunday morning.  Not much moisture should get this far north, snow potential is not very high.  BUT, even though all the major thickness indicators favor snow for this system, I still suspect a big problem- surface temperatures!  It looks to me as though surface temperatures will remain near (or above) 32 degrees throughout the precipitation event. I’d say small accumulations early Saturday will melt away during the day.  Then another minor accumulation Saturday night will melt away Sunday.  I don’t expect any road problems.

NOTE:  This is still a weak, developing system, so a lot of changes could happen over the next two days.  Updates will follow.

Climate update:

Even though the U.S. dropped out of the Paris Climate Agreement, we’re done a better job at carbon reduction than almost all the nations that did sign the agreement!.  U.S. carbon emissions were up a little last year, but we are 11% below our 2005 totals.  2005 is the “base” year for the carbon reduction goals.  Europe is also down a little, but the rest of the world continues to rapidly increase carbon emissions.  China and India are BY FAR the greatest contributors  to the increase.