Good Saturday, everyone. January is ending on a rather quiet note and I suggest you get outside and take advantage of it. February is ready to sweep in on a super active note and the pattern appears to be skewed toward the extreme for the month as a whole. There is some “wow” in this setup.

Today is a different kind of wow as temps make a run toward 60 under mostly sunny skies. Winds will be very gusty from the southwest and that carries us into Sunday. Clouds increase then as a cold front moves our way. A band of showers will move through from late Sunday into early Monday.

Temps by Monday drop several degrees, but get set to bounce back up into Groundhog Day. This is ahead of a monster storm crossing the plains and heading toward the Great Lakes. We’re on the warm side of this and will have to be on guard for strong and severe thunderstorms. Watch as this line develops on the GFS…

GFS

The severe weather threat continues to be there with damaging winds taking on a staring role. A conditional tornado threat is also present from our region and points south.

The front appears to be slowing down a bit as it moves through here and that could allow for another wave of low pressure to develop just to our east by late Wednesday and Thursday. The Canadian has that possibility…

Canadian

Much colder air continues to push in here for the second half of next week. This leads us into a pattern ripe for extreme winter weather events across the country. I’m looking at the February 7-11 timeframe for something to try to develop. The signals are there on most of the models. The GFS during that time…

GFS 3

The European Model at 500mb is textbook for something big happening…

Euro

A MONSTER ridge up the west coast with a system from the northern branch diving into a system coming out of the southern branch of the jet stream.

Wanna see more extreme? This 500mb setup puts the entire country in the deep freeze during the second week of the month…

GFS Temps

I will have updates later today. Make it a good one and take care.