Good Sunday and Merry Christmas, everyone. Our brutally cold and harsh winter pattern will begin to ease up in the coming days, but not before dumping a little more snow on the region. That comes from a clipper dropping in from the northwest.

For many of us, we have our 2nd White Christmas in the past 3 years.  2020 brought a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day snowstorm to central and eastern Kentucky. 2021 followed that up by becoming the warmest Christmas on record. Of course, we went to the other extreme this year with one of the worst stretches of winter weather on record.  Pretty wild, right?

Here’s another awesome stat. Last Christmas tied Christmas 1982 as the warmest on record. One year later, Christmas 1983 was the coldest Christmas on record with a severe arctic outbreak. History repeats itself this year with another severe arctic outbreak one year after we tied the warmest. If you really stop and think about all that… It’s actually astounding to have that extreme history repeat itself nearly 40 years later.

Our snow maker rolling in here for Monday and early Tuesday is a stout little upper level system. This brings accumulating snow to the entire region and I’ve seen nothing to sway my thoughts on snowfall from earlier…

 

You’re starting to see the models looking a lot like that map now, but they still have some typical variations…

The pattern turns much milder later next week as we come well out of the deep freeze. This is also going to turn into a very wet pattern as several systems come at us from the southwest as we find ourselves between a big trough in the west and a ridge in the east…

Once into the first week of the new year, each storm system should focus a little farther east as we get closer to going back into winter. Until that happens, my concern is for too much rain to fall around here.

Looking down the weather road deeper into January, we are likely to see the winter crash back in by week two of the new year. The CFS is showing the potential for another harsh winter setup developing…

Now, check out the following week…

In case no one is noticing, the atmosphere is in a repetitive mode that started back with a major cold blast at the end of September. We did it again in October, then in November, and now we are doing it in December. Each time, the blasts of cold were more impressive compared to normal temps at the respective times. So, you’re already seeing the signal for this to happen again during the climatological coldest point of the year.

I’ll drop by later today for another update or two. I really do hope you have a wonderful, safe and Merry Christmas. I leave you with the song of the day…

Take care.