Merry Christmas, everyone. Here’s hoping this update finds you enjoying a wonderful holiday. Mother nature is delivering us with one amazing temperature swing, but the warm is ready to win the battle over the next few days. That changes for a bit later this week, but another battle is looming.

Bowling Green hit the low 70s this afternoon making it the warmest Christmas Day on record for the city. That’s amazing. While this was happening, the north couldn’t get out of the 40s.

The warm air surges northward on Monday with 60s for the entire state, with a 70 possible in the south and west. Late day showers and thunderstorms will move in and take the edge off the temps into Tuesday.

Another system moves in late Wednesday with a quick-hitting blast of seasonal cold behind it for Thursday and Friday…

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The northwesterly flow can touch off snow showers and Flurries …

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The New Year’s Weekend system looks fairy wet as it comes at us in a couple of waves through Monday. The initial wave can produce a front end mix on New Year’s Eve…

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The global indicies I look at continue to line up for some serious winter weather taking control of the country into January. We are now seeing the ensembles catching up to the operational models in timing this sometime in the first week of January. Here are the GFS Ensembles temperature anomalies in Celsius…

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The GFS operational  shows massive blocking going on up top, forcing a mega trough across the country…

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Watch the temp anomalies on this run…

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I’m torn on what to do, because my initial winter forecast would be underdone in terms of cold and snow if this pattern does develop. I have to be careful not to make a knee-jerk reaction here, but I’ve been worried about this for a few weeks now, and the data is now strongly pointing in that direction. These are the same signals I was able to pinpoint much, much earlier in recent winters, and that led me to forecast some harsh stuff in each of those winter forecasts.

I will update things late tonight. Merry Christmas and take care.