ITHACA, NY – Take a deep breath and help yourself to another cup of your choice. Two winter storms are set to mess up the roads and make travel a hassle for the week ahead.
Your weekly weather (and storm summary)
Let’s get the most immediate short-term things out of the way before we delve into that. Today it will be cloudy with highs in the mid-20s, and tonight it will be very cloudy with lows in the mid-20s. The problems start tomorrow, late morning and early afternoon. A Winter Storm Watch was issued by the National Weather Service Binghamton office from Monday at 10am until Tuesday at 4pm.
Our national climate situation is being shaped by an extraordinarily deep and powerful branch of the polar vortex that has spread across the Great Plains to Texas. On the positive side, it means that we avoid the worst of the cold (Minneapolis will drop in -20s, Omaha around -16°F, Oklahoma City is forecast to reach -6°F, and Dallas will be close to 0°F). On the not-so-bright side, this creates a highly amplified and energetic jet pattern with the west (rear) edge of the downstream mountain range over the east coast. This energy flow will help strengthen and channel a developing storm system to the northeast from the Gulf of Texas coast, through the southeast, mid-Atlantic and northeast, and we are on target for the cold side of its precipitation shield.
YOUR LOCAL TIME NEWS ARE POSSIBLE WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
Image courtesy of NWS Binghamton.
Tompkins County – and if you are one of our regional readers, anywhere north and west of Binghamton – can expect a colder event that is just snow. Expect light to moderate snow during Monday afternoon and evening, and it will become more intense and evolve into heavier snow strips after midnight, and these heavier strips will continue until late Tuesday morning. , with lighter intervals between tracks. A few (2-3 “) inches will fall at the end of the day on Monday, with 6-9” overnight for Tuesday morning, so we are looking at total values in the 8-12 “range. Not something that people here are not used to, but the journey will become difficult, especially as the snow increases between the plow passages, so take longer if you are on the roads on Monday and especially on Tuesday. will be in the mid-1920s on Monday, and minimums on Monday night.
If you are traveling outside the area on Monday night, remember that the further south and east you go, the less snow you will see, but instead you will see more hail and freezing rain. The warm air layer is thicker in the south and east, but there will still be a layer of cold air between the ground and the warm air above (the warm air is less dense than the cold air). When you start to see more than 0.1 “of ice, that’s when you tend to start having widespread travel disruptions and power outages due to line breaks due to the weight of the ice. That means if you’re going to Boston, New York or Philadelphia, expect dangerous ice conditions and likely delays Driving on Route 17 is bad enough in normal winter conditions, but having the highway turn into an ice-covered bobsled track is even worse.
As the storm extends to the northeast on Tuesday afternoon, some intense rain from the lake will persist behind the downtown, but nothing major. With the cooler air entering the rear flank of its counterclockwise flow, a little more of that bitter Arctic air will seep through, with lows on Tuesday 20s under cloudy skies and some isolated snow showers, and generally cloudy skies with some snow showers on Tuesday night as the lows fall to the first digits.
High pressure will rise briefly from the west to Wednesday, and this should be our quietest day, with partly cloudy skies and highs in the mid-20s. Wednesday night will be very cloudy and dry, with teenage lows.
The next system starts to be built in the northeast direction on Thursday. The large-scale jet flow pattern will persist, but in this case, the crest of the jet jet will have retrograded a little to the west, meaning that the downtown core goes west, placing Tompkins County in its sector. hot. We will start with high temperatures and snow just after sunrise on Thursday, with light to moderate snow continuing throughout the day as temperatures rise to almost zero at sunset; estimates now suggest 4 to 6 inches, and the quantity has tended to decline in the last runs of the model.
By midnight Thursday through Friday morning, enough hot air will have funneled by the storm’s counterclockwise flow to turn snow into rain, and temperatures will be between 30 and 30 seconds for the rest of the night and during most of the day Friday, a cold and constant rain as the current forecast. This warm air will make the difference between a few inches of snow and a foot, so we need to keep an eye on it for the next few days. The cooler air will be filtered back on Friday night, as the low pressure center of the storm passes our longitude around sunset and the northern flow begins to appear, and some snowfalls will persist on the night of Friday with casualties around 20°F.
The first indications for the next weekend show that it will be quiet, since the high pressure increases for Saturday and Sunday; on the cold (east) side of its flow clockwise, Saturday, it will be partly cloudy with highs in the upper part of the 1920s, and Sunday, on the hot (west) side of the high, temperatures look like they will reach the mid-1930s high with partly cloudy skies.
Graphics courtesy of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center.
Extended Outlook
Around next week, the mid-range models suggest a regime change in the jet configuration. With the polar vortex substantially depleted by its long journey to the center of the United States, it will retreat, and this will allow a ridge to build in much of the country’s eastern two-thirds, although at least one lobe of polar air persists through the Alaska, Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Precipitation would be almost normal for the last third of February. Longer-term runs suggest almost normal temperatures and rainfall for early March, which is also the beginning of the spring weather.
Keep your fingers crossed, tight? Enjoy your drinks and Valentine’s Day dinners, guys. Hopefully, they are preparing very hot dishes.