Good Monday everyone and thanks a bunch for checking in on the blog. The first week of November is in the books and it was one of the colder stats to November we have seen in a while. Temps over the first 7 days of the month ranged from 3 to nearly 7 degrees below normal across the state. Brrrr. Now comes the balancing act from mother nature as temps go the other direction this week. Enjoy it… all signs point toward winter trying to crank up and lock in starting next week and carrying us into November.

A real blast of Indian Summer is coming this week for a lot of the country. Around here… that means we get temps in the 60s for highs each day… and there will be a few days where the temp hits 70 or a little better. Mostly sunny skies will be with us this week as well. This will make for a good time to get our and rake some leaves or even get a head start on some of those Christmas/Holiday lights and decorations. Wow… Did I just write that? This year has flown by!

The change in our overall weather pattern will undergo a big change this weekend and that will kick into high gear next week into the following week. A storm will head develop across the plains later this week and head toward the western Great Lakes by late Friday into Saturday. This will drive a cold front through the region giving us a chance for showers and even some thunderstorms.

Once the front blows through… the cold air seeps in from the northwest and will gradually become colder next week. The setup next week will find a big ridge of high pressure developing off the west coast then nosing up into Alaska. This ridge looks to actually strengthen over the next few weeks and we combine that with, what may become, a serious amount of blocking showing up. This would dump a lot of cold air across much of the country and may actually be a coast to coast type of cold. The southern branch of the jet stream is likely to be fairly active as well and this may set up a lot of early season snows across the country.

You can see the GFS Ensembles are hinting at this pattern as early as next week…

This is also the time of year I like to look at the GFS Ensembles Analog years that match the overall pattern they are seeing setting up. Take a look at some of the years the model says the upcoming pattern is a match too…

Wow… there are a few heavyweight winters showing up on that list. 1969, 1993, 1976 and 1950 were all blockbuster winters around here. 1989 featured the coldest December on record. Looking at those years got me to thinking about how the following Decembers turned out on a whole. If we roll forward to December based on the years on the Day 11 analog list.. you get a December that looks like this…

Maybe the CFS seasonal model knows something after all…

As someone who has been touting an early start to a winter that is likely front loaded… I love seeing those analog years showing up. One of those years… 1950… has been coming up a bit of late on my personal analog list. That winter was made famous by the Thanksgiving Week Great Appalachian Snowstorm. That produced 1 to 2 feet of snow across much of Kentucky. Now… I am not saying something like that will happen again. But… the new GFS has something fun to look at for the start of this Thanksgiving Week…

Enjoy the warm and nice weather of this week as Old Man Winter looks to be in a cranky mood from having to wake up early this year.

Have a great Monday and take care.