1-5-2014- Sunday Night

Greetings and welcome!

So this is how Thermogeddon starts…

9:48pm- The TV has Wabeno checking in with the area’s low temp with  -14, and with the wind a  -28 wind chill. Athelstane Weather has  -5, but with a 13 mph wind, a -24 wind chill.

The Arctic air mass bringing this harsh weather is indeed a cold one. Looking at my upper air maps I am seeing temperatures a few thousand feet up solidly in the -30C range, call it -22F. It isn’t unprecedented at all to see the -30C line hit our area, but usually we don’t get this much of it for this long.

Even with a sunny day the -22F air is only going to warm up so much. There we have our high temps of -10 to -15 for tomorrow and only slightly better for Tuesday. The low tonight is expected to be -22 in Lakewood.

It is just a wee bit colder knowing that the big cold blast came on the heels of a big snow storm that didn’t come anywhere near our area. It is a cold day in the cheap seats.

We did not get any snow out of the storm, but we will get the wind behind it. The current forecast is for 10 to 15 mph winds, and the TV says that they could gust to 25.

So it is going to be cold for a few days, but then there is a big warm up on the way for late week and the weekend. Friday looks like mid-20s, Saturday low 30s, and  Sunday could go into the mid 30s, possibly a little too far.

There is a little clipper snow possible over the weekend next weekend. Beyond that the GFS is showing a couple of clippers, but no big storms for its 16 day duration. We only had a couple of dustings last week and this week doesn’t look much better.

We could definitely use some snow. We had one big storm around Thanksgiving (8″ plus an inch of rain on top) and maybe 6 or 8 clippers that left an inch or three. It has not been that snowy of a winter so far.

In my travels over the weekend I saw trails from Crivitz to Carter. You can ride, but there are good and bad spots. Crivitz was looking pretty thin, and Wausaukee was only a little better. Iron Snowshoe looked nice in a lot of places, but there were thin ones too. Lakewood and Townsend were holding up pretty well, but again there were some bad areas too. It is all that you could ask out of our snow cover and the groomers only having a little to work with. A little more snow would go a long way.

Well I am off to get some sleep. I have to be up early to make sure that the car will start at -20 or so in the morning.

Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB