Good Tuesday and Merry Christmas Eve! It’s a mild Christmas week that we continue to track, but big changes look to blow into town this weekend and into the closing days of 2019. This will bring Old Man Winter back into our region, with early January looking to right the winter weather ship.

The weather this week is mild, but it does come with clouds from time to time. As a matter of fact, those clouds may spit a few sprinkles at us later Christmas Day with a few showers possible by later Thursday and Friday.

The main show arrives this weekend in the form of a potent plains storm system. That will drag a pattern changing cold front across the region late Saturday into Sunday. Ahead of this, temps Saturday may be the warmest of the week as a strong southwesterly flow kicks in. This will lead to showers and thunderstorms developing ahead of the front.

Once the boundary passes through, temps drop like a proverbial rock and will be more than 30 degrees colder than the numbers ahead of it. There’s also the potential for some backlash snows.

This scenario has been consistent on the GFS…

I’ve not shown the European Model with this system because the model was suffering from it’s normal bias of holding back energy in the southwest. The latest run corrected that and looks more like the GFS, but with a twist. The Euro develops another low along the front…

That would certainly make things a little more interesting for Sunday night and Monday.

Once the early week system move through, we are likely to see a deeper trough digging into the country by the end of next week. Watch how the Euro digging in with that trough…

The GFS Ensembles continue to take on an active winter look over the next few weeks, suggesting snow chances into the deep south…

I will get you an update later today. Merry Christmas Eve and take care.