What is interesting is the CAA really starts to strengthen from 66-84hr turning a lot of the rain to freezing rain. It would be interesting if A. this is a start of a trend and B. what would happen beyond that. With all the convection that will be south, it wouldn't surprise me to see the low further south as well especially if the system doesn't take a negative tilt which the NAM didn't do.
The air mass is the cold air pressing in not the prefrontal airmass which is why there is a lot of ice being shown especially with the multiple piece setup it is showing.
Week 1 Blowtorch
Week 2 near to slightly above normal.
Week 3 same only cooler than normal to the north and west
Week 4 same
Week 5 and beyond dartboard.
One thing that is consistent, it gets cold out west and stays that way through the duration.
I couldn't find climatology for thickness records, but 500mb heights I did find, and that would have been near historic. The lowest heights I found for Melbourne was 544dm and 550dm for Miami. This was 547 and 550 exactly.