Almost everything outside of the mid-week light snow shower chance is now based in hoping February's decent ensemble modeling trends aren't the 40th head fake of the winter season. The GEFS snow mean is nice but seemingly meaningless the past few winters, as it has virtually not verified in 48 months when it shows these snowy solutions. The Euro at D10 looks better than it did at day 10 yesterday, so there's that. Still looks like a robust frontal passage behind a cutter in a fast moving pattern, rather than something that will set up shop and allow for truly cold weather to arrive for any length of time.
If we get lucky and the Polar Vortex splits but will it help us? It split last year and record breaking cold hit the Midwest but didn't propagate into our back yards. I've not looked but I'd guess there's been very few times when Chicago had highs in the -10 range that it didn't get cold here. Last year that happened and we stayed warm. It also takes a few weeks for the PV to change weather in the Lower 48 most of the time. That would put us on track for the backside of February into March at best, where even with the aid of the TPV we'd probably be looking at lower elevation cold rain and elevated snow unless we got a bowling ball.
If we are still hoping to reel in something in the D9-16 range in a week or 10 days, winter is likely over until late March or April, where it will invariably turn frigid for 2 weeks with rain or snow showers.