Good Wednesday to one and all. 2019 is off and running on a rather gloomy note with… Wait for it… Wait for it… More rain rolling in. This rain comes in a couple of waves with the first impacting the south and east today and the next one areawide by Friday.

Where the heck is winter? As you know, my winter forecast was heavily weighted on winter arriving for the second half of the season. I’ll get to all that in a bit.

Let’s start with today’s rain rolling into parts of the state. This mainly impacts the south and east, but a few showers can’t be ruled out across the rest of the region. Here’s your regional radar to track whatever shows up:

Thursday will find just a shower chance across the region as our next system gets ready to roll in. This is the system the models had well off the southeastern seaboard up until a few days ago. Now? It’s so far west that it’s another rain maker for our region…

That system misses it’s connecting flight and just cannot get any cold air into it.

Once that goes by, temps turn mild for the weekend, before a greater change develops. That change means we actually slow down the southern storm brigade, leading to the northern branch to throw some systems our way…

That’s more of a back and forth pattern setting up next week, but those initial changes of slowing down the southern storm track are important and a sign of bigger changes ahead.

For the past few weeks, a lot of folks have been asking me about a Sudden Stratospheric Warming over the North Pole. This generally spits the Polar Vortex and sends it toward lower latitudes across the Northern Hemisphere. Much of that talk was based on model forecasts that were still a ways away from happening, so I didn’t even comment on it. Plus, the impact of such a split of the Polar Vortex isn’t even felt until a few weeks or so after it happens.

Well, that’s now upon us and Dr. Judah Cohen has the illustration…

If we look at the new European Weeklies from WeatherBell, we see the type of pattern you would expect from that. Here’s a 7 day temperature anomaly later this month…

7 day temp anomaly as we end January and head into early February…

And into the middle of February…

The snowfall from through this same time period…

This goes along with the seasonal analogs that I’ve talked about over the past few months. All are skewed toward the second half of winter. Plus, aren’t most of our winters of the past decade been late bloomers? 3 of the past 4 winters have featured historic snowstorms after January. Even the winter of 13/14 didn’t get kicking until the middle of January then didn’t stop until late March. Same thing with 08/09 and 09/10.  The only winter that kicked butt early was 10/11. 12/13 was just a “meh” winter that was normal-ish. The only horrible non-winters were 11/12 and 16/17.

Remember, seasonal forecasting is a marathon and not a spring. Everyone wants instant gratification, but the weather just does not work that way, especially in wintertime. 🙂

I will have updates later today, so check back. Make it a great Wednesday and take care.