Good Monday, my fellow weather weenies. It’s the start of a brand new week and we have pockets of light snow and flurries across parts of the Commonwealth. The main concentration is across the southeast where some minor accumulations will show up for some. Once this scoots through, temps rebound before another wintry change this coming weekend.

In the overall scheme of things, is this touch of winter a big event? Absolutely not, but it may whiten the ground across areas of the east and, especially, southeast. Here are your radars to play a friendly game of ‘find the flakes”…

A few flakes fly through early Tuesday as temps continue to run colder than normal. This has been a much below normal first 7 days of December, but the numbers do climb as the week wears on.

The pattern from Wednesday through Friday is a pleasant one with much milder numbers. This is ahead of a potent storm system cranking across the Mississippi Valley and rolling our way by the weekend. That drags a cold front through here with rain and wind ahead of it, and much colder air crashing in behind it. We will need to watch and see if this front can produce another wave of low pressure along it once it’s on top of us or just to our east.

Here’s how the Canadian sees it and how it finds another system right behind it early next week…

If we look at the upcoming pattern purely through the various indices, we find a muddled message. A -NAO and -AO are forecast to continue over the next two weeks…

Those are signals for cold across the country, especially in the eastern half.

The big driver of the recent cold has been a ridge up the west coast, but this is forecast to come way back down. You can see the -PNA taking over…

That’s typically a milder pattern in the east.

The EPO bounces around between a – and +…

A -EPO is a cold signal in the east, while a +EPO is generally a milder signal.

So which one of these will win out or will we play a game of back and forth with each of them flexing on the rest from time to time?

The one thing that would make this fight more interesting is if the MJO continues to stay in the null phase. The various forecasts actually keep the MJO signal fairly muted going forward…

In addition to the forecast, you can see where the MJO has been since late October. Going forward, cold and snow lovers want to make sure the MJO never gets into phases 3,4,5 and 6. Why is that? Look at the temperature composites for each phase this time of year…

The current MJO forecasts show a low amplitude event in the null phase going forward. That would mean the other indices such as the NAO, AO, PNA and EPO will have much more influence. Moral of the story, the overall weather pattern is looking for a driver to take control right now. Given the indices throwing conflicting signals at us, I wouldn’t put much stock on an medium to long range Ensembles going forward. They’ve been pretty bad this year, anyway. Remember back in mid November when I went on a rant about folks throwing around “torch for Thanksgiving and early December”? They were using ensembles without even checking on their performance this year.

If you’re a winter lover, let’s get that MJO to go strongly into phases 7, 8 and 1. 🙂

Updates will come your way later today. Have a good one and take care.