Good Tuesday and welcome to the start of meteorological spring! March is coming in like a lamb after the last day of February took on the role of the lion with all kinds of severe weather and flooding. While the new month is starting off rather tame… it appears to have a lot of roar in the weeks ahead as our active pattern continues. We will also watch to see what old man winter has planned for a finale.

Day one of March looks good with mostly sunny skies and temps warming into the mid 40s in the north and low 50s in the west and south. A weak front will work into the region later Wednesday and will have nothing to work with. Winds will pick up ahead of the front as temps warm into the upper 50s to low 60s with a few clouds rolling in.

As the front blows through… temps will come down a few degrees for Thursday with more in the way of sunshine.

Our next storm system will be taking shape across the plains states by Friday and will roll our way over the weekend. This is likely to be another very potent storm that has severe weather and heavy rains ahead of it with snow on the backside of the low. We would start to feel the impact as southerly winds bring moisture into the region for showers as early as Friday.
 
From there… Take a look at how the models are playing this storm…

European Model


Canadian Model


Taken verbatim… both models show heavy rain and possible strong storms Saturday into Saturday night with a switch much colder air and some light wraparound snows into Sunday.

The latest run of the GFS is spitting out another 1″-2″ with locally higher amounts of rain during this time…



That would mark our third big storm with heavy rains in a little over a week and there is likely to be another storm cut into our region by the middle of next week. With so much water in the ground and in our waterways… the rivers are going to be really rolling on the high side for a while and will continue to be something for us to keep a close eye on with such a stormy setup.

This is a pattern we began to hone in on more some three weeks ago. The amount of cold building up in Canada and the seasonal warmth across the southern states would cause storms to roll into the Ohio Valley creating a very active pattern. That is what’s going on right now and it doesn’t show many signs of stopping into March.

What does winter have left? I am in full blown spring mode and would rather not even think about anything other than mild temps, but I have to call it like I see it. Before we can get TRUE spring into our part of the world… the cold air in Canada has got to come southward into the eastern half of the country so we can wipe out the cold air supply to our north in order to get spring to… spring.

We will get some of that cold in here behind our weekend storm, but the bulk of the colder temps may wait until the next storm by the middle of next week to overwhelm the pattern. You can see the Canadian cold I am talking about and how it comes southward here on the GFS Ensembles temp anomaly maps…



And no… I do not think we have seen our last snowfall of the season. I say go ahead and get it out of your system old man and let’s get on with REAL spring.

I will update as needed. Have a great Tuesday and take care.