Good Monday, everyone. It’s the first full week of December and things continue to look on the busy side. We have another big rain maker ready to roll in from the southwest. From there, arctic air surges in for the second half of the week. This continues to look like a pattern loaded with very cold shots, with shots at snow thrown in for good measure. 🙂

Let’s begin with the heavy rain maker ready to move in. Clouds and seasonally chilly temps in the 40s will be noted out there today. The rain arrives from southwest to northeast this evening and carries us through Tuesday. Heavy rain amounts of greater than 1″ will be possible.

Several of the models are now back to showing some 2″ rains across the southeast…

gfs-rain

Wednesday turns colder as the day wears on with the actual arctic front arriving Wednesday night into Thursday morning. The amount of precipitation along and behind this front remains a question mark, with most of the modelling leaving off the wave of low pressure.

Still, the has a band of light snow behind the front…

nam-2

That may be just a little overzealous, but has a shot of happening.

With such cold air surging in from the northwest, we have to look at the amount of moisture showing up in the lowest levels of the atmosphere. The NAM shows a lot of low level juice moving in from the northwest on Thursday…

nam-3

The Canadian Model looks like a scaled down version of the NAM, with a VERY weak wave of low pressure bringing some light snow and flurries behind the front…

canadian

The northwesterly flow then kicks in and tries to aim some lake enhanced snows our way late Thursday into Friday…

canadian-4

That’s a cold look for the end of the week with a couple days in the 20s for highs with lows deep into the teens. Wind chills will be even colder.

The weekend system continues to look different with each and every model run. I don’t like any run that blows that system up into a big storm. At the moment, I don’t see that to be the case.

Instead, we could look at competing weaker systems rolling through the region with light precipitation…

canadian-3

Once that zips through here, another big arctic shot is likely to dip into the country early next week. This one should be colder than the one coming later this week. Several recent runs of the Ensembles and operational models have offered up some super cold stuff. The latest GFS being among them…

gfs-2

gfs-temps-2

How will all this play out with snow chances between now and Christmas? That remains to be seen, but you can’t have snow without the cold shots. 😉

I will see you later today for another update. Make it a great Monday and take care.