Exciting finish to the month coming a bit more into view

Over the course of the last several years, there's been plenty of talk about "snow holes" or storms that always seem to hit the New England coastline but miss the northern Green Mountains. Discussion such as this always underscores the old adage that the grass seems to always be greener on the other side of the fence. Except it really isn't true, we just only seem to take notice when cities like Boston are buried under 2-3 feet of snow that Vermont manages to mostly miss. One thing that eventually always holds true is climatology and the law of averages and that everything, given enough time will gravitates back to the mean. This year, it mostly decidedly has. The old snow hole, which can move from one geographical location to another from one year to another has decided to situate itself over Boston, MA this year. Look at these numbers.

Mad Rive Glen 111"
Richmond, VA 11.2"
New York City 6.4"
Boston, MA 0.2"

And wow, look at this upcoming storm this Sunday. Yes, it will completely miss MRG as expected, but will also miss Boston and they are likely to spend yet another week in the 0.2 inches of seasonal snowfall territory. These things actually do happen.

So with that, the weekend looks sunnier now on the mountains but continued chilly. Satuday will be a little blustery but a little calmer on Sunday. Temperatures will struggle to get above 10 during the days and be well below zero at night.

Next week appears to be a rather tranquil one for much of eastern North America but as the blog has alluded to previously, temperatures will remain below the freezing mark for the most part. Readings will climb into the 20's Monday and be up near 30 on Tuesday. Wednesday marks the next chance for snowfall which will come from a innocuous looking weather feature that will mark the advance of our thaw-saving chill down. We can thus hope for a few inches of snow from the weather feature Wednesday before temperatures fall back to below average levels Thursday and Friday.

The arctic air late in the upcoming week will be the first product of a newly developed "omega block" in the jet stream that will form over the Arctic Circle north of Alaska. This will keep more arctic air on the playing field not only late next week but will also keep it there for much of the rest of the month. There has been more incessant hype about North America landing itself once again in the deep freeze but a deeper dive into some of the data indicates that there are continued issues getting the Pacific to entirely settle down. In this case I am actually happy about this because I think it will keep the pattern from getting overwhelmed with cold air and allow for a more active and stormier scenario. There are a few storms showing up on the forecast simulations beyond January 18th, the first coming MLK weekend and a few more after that. It will be chaotic and there is the chance for a storm to track in more adverse fashion, even in a unfavorable pattern. Overall though, this appears to be an exciting way to finish what has already been a decent month.