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January 2015 Arctic Attack Thread


Marion_NC_WX

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Well...there has been a definite change in the Tide (sorry Alabama fans, had to throw that in there) in regards to the models over the past several days. It looks as if the first full week of January is going to be very similar to that of one year ago...

 

The past couple weeks have featured a raging flow from the Pacific combined with a strong Ridge sitting in the SW Atlantic which has sent many cold weather lovers looking for a place to hide after we initially thought that the timeframe around Christmas would turn much colder...yes, its been about a 2 week delay but from all indications we are not going to be disappointed in what's about to come down the pipeline...

 

 

The ensembles (using the GFS) have really locked in to establishing a much better look with the west coast ridge extending all the way up into Alaska...where the current block has allowed the cold to cross poles and move into Canada and the Northern US...the big helper is that the re-stablished ridge out west has also dislodged the pesky pig ridge across the south...now opening to the door for a major discharge of arctic air...

 

The following images on the ensembles (Days 5, 10 and 13) show the upcoming plunge followed by a brief relaxation only to re-establish itself by mid month...and on the side, I would keep an eye between days 8-10 just to see if any southern stream action could sneak up an icing event on the Upper Southeast (I-40, I-85 Cooridor)...but that's another topic for another day.

post-1418-0-12424400-1420213992_thumb.pn

 

post-1418-0-58184400-1420214029_thumb.pn

 

post-1418-0-30310700-1420214052_thumb.pn

 

 

 

The GFS, its para and the Canadian have been hinting at this for a few days now and yesterday the Euro decided to fold in that direction with actually the most extreme look of all...so the writing it on the wall with this one, even though I would not go as far yet as what the King is trying to say...

 

 

 

Looking at the temps...a clipper system will travel from the midwest into the Ohio Valley and off the East Coast on Tuesday (late) delivering all the goods...by Wednesday (late) the coldest temps will  settle into the Southeast US which will send the temps crashing...

Look at the cold air as it progresses south and east starting late Tuesday through Thursday morning as it bottoms out across the Southeast. High's on Tuesday will be in the 40's in North Carolina ranging into the 60's to around 70 for lower SC and the lower half of GA and into Florida...but the arctic front passes through late Tuesday, temps on Wednesday could easily stay in the 30's across NC with one last day of 40's/low 50's especially south of I-20 before the mother load unleashes...Remember in last year's plunge how downsloping off the Apps kept some areas warm through mid afternoon and then as soon as surface mixing stopped the cold took over...I see a similar thing happening in this case...By Thursday morning everyone in the Southeast US will be in the teens to lower 20's, with upper 20's down into the Florida Panhandle. Temps in the SoApps Region and Foothills could fall into the single digits with temps above 3000 ft approaching zero...

 

Tues 18z

post-1418-0-08471800-1420216223_thumb.pn

 

 

Weds 18z

post-1418-0-72537800-1420216282_thumb.pn

 

 

Thurs AM

post-1418-0-78010300-1420216575_thumb.pn

 

 

 

In summary, this looks to be quite an impressive arctic outbreak, I don't think it will be quite as bad as last year's event but it will be darn close...also, given the recent turnaround in the models, this could very easily come in a couple different waves throughout the entire month...

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Good post! If the Euro didn't completely flip and rival the GFS temps and match them, almost identically over most of the SE, it would still be in question...but with the Euro/GFS and their ensembles matching, this seems imminent. I don't remember how it went down last year but I don't seem to recall a model flipping that hard and lining up perfectly in one run. It will be interesting to see once it gets range on the short range models, SREF, etc just how much cold we're looking at. This has plenty of time to trend colder but there's always a worry of the cold bias in models.

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Looks like Elsa brought back winter on hiatus from November.....  Now if we can just get something to hold, this shot looks like a quick hitter on the models right now.  I am impressed/disappointed in the models as they didn't pick up on this very well until recently.  I took a two day break and came back to models dropping an arctic hammer, I do wish it would stick around but it looks right now like an in and out deal. A lot of folks have been saying though that the models could not be trusted out past five days and this is a pretty good example.  If this verifies it will be pretty cool considering nothing like this was being sniffed out last week.

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Dan, looking at the Euro, the cold front blasts through at the same time of day that last years hit. Temps drop almost in the same exact time frame too. Almost spooky.

mint.20140107.gif

 

It's going to come close, I think. This could be another record breaker...odd that it's on the same day.

 

Here's an old model run I have from the same time period....0F line came into central NC and -24 actually did verify in the mountains (I guess due to snow pack?)

DH7e7WH.png

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mint.20140107.gif

It's going to come close, I think. This could be another record breaker...odd that it's on the same day.

Here's an old model run I have from the same time period....0F line came into central NC and -24 actually did verify in the mountains (I guess due to snow pack?)

DH7e7WH.png

Jon I don't think we had any snow anywhere in the mtns at that time. Those cold readings in nW nc are at Mt Mitchell and grandfather I believe. The rest are mostly locations below 3000ft.
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Jon I don't think we had any snow anywhere in the mtns at that time. Those cold readings in nW nc are at Mt Mitchell and grandfather I believe. The rest are mostly locations below 3000ft.

Oh ok thanks I was too lazy to look it up, I had a feeling that was the case but also -24 with no snow is wild.

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Wow,  another red flag that this winter has sucked.  Making threads on transient cold shots 6 days out..  It looks right now that it will get cold but wow, desperate for anything at this point I see.

 

We had a similar thread for last winter's January cold shots.  I think it's appropriate, and I'm looking forward to it.  How low can we go?

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We had a similar thread for last winter's January cold shots.  I think it's appropriate, and I'm looking forward to it.  How low can we go?

This shot will have to trend colder to match 2014 for my area. I managed a 3.5 f reading last jan. We shall see, right now I think add about 8-10 degrees on to the blast from last year.. We usually end up with 1-2 days that don't break freezing so it wouldn't be anything unprecedented here. It is something to talk about and I already told my fiancée to expect some cold to come next week,

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This shot will have to trend colder to match 2014 for my area. I managed a 3.5 f reading last jan. We shall see, right now I think add about 8-10 degrees on to the blast from last year.. We usually end up with 1-2 days that don't break freezing so it wouldn't be anything unprecedented here. It is something to talk about and I already told my fiancée to expect some cold to come next week,

I got down to -0.3. The coldest reading I ever remember. Of course, having a snowpack on the ground greatly helped. My forecast for that morning was like 11. A huge bust.

 

I seriously doubt this cold blast comes anywhere close to last January. It's not often you have temps of 0 or below south of I-20 in Georgia.

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Nice look by the GEFS day 11+...actually like that the trough is a little progressive at this range. Aleutian low too. Hint of weak -NAO trying to develop (knock on wood).

for the last 4-5 runs the euro ensembles have been showing,and building on the low gulf Coast /se heights. Nino pattern taking control?
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for the last 4-5 runs the euro ensembles have been showing,and building on the low gulf Coast /se heights. Nino pattern taking control?

I moved the post to the pattern thread, didn't realize we had a artic thread :-)

But, yeah the GEFS has been ticking better with that. Even the EPS showed lower heights in the S/SE last night.

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I got down to -0.3. The coldest reading I ever remember. Of course, having a snowpack on the ground greatly helped. My forecast for that morning was like 11. A huge bust.

 

I seriously doubt this cold blast comes anywhere close to last January. It's not often you have temps of 0 or below south of I-20 in Georgia.

 

We did not have snow on the ground during the cold shot that brought us those readings last year.

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There were three "main" cold blasts in January last year.  The coldest one at the beginning of the month (a.k.a. "OMGZ POLAR VORTEX!!!") did not have any snow on the ground.  However, there was another cold blast in late January after the cold late January Southern snowstorm that also dropped temperatures into the single digits here (though it was a few degrees warmer).  There was also another cold blast before the southern snowstorm that did not have any snow on the ground (though we might have had some here since we got a half-inch or so on the 21st... though I'd guess that was melted by then).

 

The cold blast we made the thread for was the first cold blast in early January.

 

You can see a reading of 5 on January 7th, 7 on January 24th, and 7 on January 30th.  It was remarkable to have three single digit lows in a single month considering we had gone nearly a decade since our last single digit reading here (2005, which was unusually long).

 

GSO: (look at that -25F DP!)

  TEMPERATURE IN F:       :PCPN:    SNOW:  WIND      :SUNSHINE: SKY     :PK WND
================================================================================
1   2   3   4   5  6A  6B    7    8   9   10  11  12  13   14  15   16   17  18
                                     12Z  AVG MX 2MIN
DY MAX MIN AVG DEP HDD CDD  WTR  SNW DPTH SPD SPD DIR MIN PSBL S-S WX    SPD DR
================================================================================

 1  50  29  40   1  25   0 0.00  0.0    0  3.9 13 190   M    M   6        16 190
 2  45  34  40   1  25   0 0.42  0.0    0  6.3 25 310   M    M  10 18     35 300
 3  36  19  28 -11  37   0    T  0.0    0 11.2 36 300   M    M   1        46 300
 4  36  17  27 -12  38   0    T  0.0    0  3.6 10 200   M    M   5        14 190
 5  41  31  36  -3  29   0 0.51  0.0    0  4.1 12  60   M    M  10 12     14 270
 6  43  10  27 -12  38   0 0.21  0.0    0 16.2 28 290   M    M   6 12     36 320
 7  23   5  14 -25  51   0 0.00  0.0    0  7.7 18 310   M    M   2        23 300
 8  42  14  28 -11  37   0 0.00  0.0    0  4.3 10 190   M    M   3        15 180
 9  51  23  37  -1  28   0 0.00  0.0    0  2.0  9 160   M    M   7        15 200
10  43  35  39   1  26   0 0.82  0.0    0  5.4 13  50   M    M  10 1      15  40
11  59  38  49  11  16   0 1.40  0.0    0  9.3 30 310   M    M  10 123    36 310
12  56  35  46   7  19   0 0.00  0.0    0  8.7 22 280   M    M   0        28 270
13  58  33  46   7  19   0 0.05  0.0    0  8.5 22 230   M    M   7 1      29 240
14  56  34  45   6  20   0 0.28  0.0    0  5.5 16 290   M    M   6 1      20 280
15  55  28  42   3  23   0 0.01    T    0  4.9 17 310   M    M   6 128    22 330
16  42  30  36  -3  29   0 0.00  0.0    0  5.1 14 240   M    M   2        18 250
17  51  26  39   0  26   0 0.00  0.0    0  9.4 21 210   M    M   4        28 210
18  37  26  32  -7  33   0 0.00  0.0    0 10.7 25 290   M    M   2        32 290
19  51  27  39   0  26   0 0.00  0.0    0  9.1 24 280   M    M   3        30 300
20  62  28  45   6  20   0 0.00  0.0    0  7.3 18 230   M    M   2        23 220
21  47  25  36  -3  29   0 0.17  0.4    0  6.7 15 350   M    M   6 1      22 350
22  29  17  23 -16  42   0 0.00  0.0    T  4.9 16 320   M    M   3        20 320
23  36  17  27 -12  38   0 0.00  0.0    0  8.2 22 280   M    M   5        28 280
24  25   7  16 -23  49   0 0.00  0.0    0  7.2 15  10   M    M   2        22  10
25  39  18  29 -10  36   0 0.00  0.0    0 14.0 28 210   M    M   5        35 200
26  52  18  35  -4  30   0 0.00  0.0    0 10.0 22 210   M    M   3        28 220
27  61  30  46   7  19   0 0.00  0.0    0 11.1 20 310   M    M   6        24 300
28  30  17  24 -16  41   0 0.11  1.2    0  9.3 17  50   M    M   9 1      23  30
29  26  15  21 -19  44   0    T    T    1  3.2 10  20   M    M   7        14  10
30  35   7  21 -19  44   0 0.00  0.0    0  1.8  8  60   M    M   1         M  M
31  53  15  34  -6  31   0 0.00  0.0    0  3.6  9 220   M    M   4        12 220
================================================================================
SM 1370  708       968   0  3.98     1.6 223.2          M      153
================================================================================
AV 44.2 22.8                               7.2 FASTST   M    M   5    MAX(MPH)
                                 MISC ---->  # 36 300               # 46  300
================================================================================
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Euro looks to not be as extreme as last night. 

Really? Low bombing earlier in the right place should bring the arctic air deep...how far are you out to?

 

NVM yeah I see it now, roughly 5 or so degrees warmer it appears...

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