Good afternoon, folks. The transition to wintertime continues to show up strongly in the week ahead and this looks to carry us through Christmas and into the start of the new year. Everything gets started with a big storm system developing in the next few days.

Let’s focus all our energy on this big storm system right out of the gate. The GFS continues to show something different with each run and the model runs 4 times a day.

The latest GFS run looks like this…

Notice how it doesn’t have very much in terms of light snow or flurries behind that around here, but it develops a southern system coming in from the southwest to brush the state with some light snow on Sunday.

The GFS run just a few hours before had no southern system and brought in ample amounts of light snow and flurries behind the northeastern storm…

That run of the GFS actually matches up with the Canadian…

Again, the pattern suggests some light snows behind all that mess by Friday and Saturday. That’s not a huge deal, but some light accumulations will be possible heading into the weekend before Christmas. Festive flakes, folks!!! ❄️🎄😁

Let’s ramp it up a notch when talking about the cold coming after this storm. We are likely heading into a severe period of arctic air taking hold of much of the country for the week leading up to Christmas and this may hold through the start of 2023.

This will be headline making and likely cause a lot of issues for our nation.

The EURO Ensembles are made up of 51 different members. Each of those 51 runs gets thrown into the mix and it spits out an average. This average continues to be among the coldest solutions I’ve ever seen from the Euro Ensembles…

The control run of the EURO ensembles is just a single, more skilled, run. This is brutal…

At the peak, that’s forecasting temps near 70 degrees below normal across the northern plains.

For us, it’s interesting to see the models locked on to arctic air invading Kentucky around Christmas. Why?  Let me go back to Christmas 1982 and Christmas 1983.

Christmas Day 1982 was Lexington’s warmest on record with a high of 70 degrees. The following Christmas Day 1983 was the coldest with a low of -9.

If you recall, last Christmas we tied the record from 1982 with 70 degrees. Are we going to pull a 1983 one year later? While we may not get that cold, it’s pretty amazing to see the parallels.

I’ll update things later today. Have a good one and take care.