Greetings and welcome!
I have to apologize for taking the day off yesterday. I had a glorious day planned complete with time on the trail with temps in the 20s. Instead I ended up with what we are guessing was a stomach flu. I was one sick guy.
Anyway, since I haven’t been too far, I will catch up on a few things and git.
First up is the cold wave. The colder than normal temperatures reach all of the way to the southern tip of FL. A lot of places are scrambling to save vegetable and citrus crops as temperatures only go above 32 for a few hours a day. You guys thought I was being silly talking about cold enough to snow at Disney World Orlando. It is real, and really bad for a lot of our southern states. Check out this article, one of many like it in the recent past.
It will not get better in the short term. There is a clipper that kind of demonstrates how far south and west the cold has gone. Instead of coming through northern MN and hitting us, it is coming down through Montana, and going to hit hundreds of miles farther south than usual. We might see an inch or two, but our friends on either side of the WI/IL state line could see 4″+ as the storm tracks over them.
As is typical of clippers, there will be a cold wave behind it, again terrible news to our friends in the deep south. Around here we should see highs in the teens over the weekend. That doesn’t seem too bad, but add 10 degrees and try for a hi temp in Birmingham or Atlanta. A lot of bad stuff is happening, and it won’t get better for a while.
For the record, this is not a problem unique to the USA. Shop around the international news once, Europe, Russia, China, most of the northern hemisphere is in an abnormal deep freeze.
About the middle of the month the GFS is showing things turning in the other direction. It is a little chaotic, but it looks like we could see some 32F plus days between the 14th and 21st. The GFS is showing things finally switching out of the Arctic flow and more toward a zonal (west to east) storm path.
The zonal flow is not the best for our sport. Temperatures tend to be on the upper limits of where we want to be. Often times the storms don’t bring much snow, having dropped it all over the Rocky Mountains.
I am going to suggest that we take it with a grain of salt until it gets closer. I used the word chaotic before to describe it, and it is a week away.
Well, I am off to continue my recovery, and will be back tomorrow.
Have a good Wednesday and thank you for visiting!
RJB