Highlights:
- Bitterly cold weekend
- Big shift in temperatures next week
- Icy set-up late next week?
Heavy Winter Gear Required…We’ll watch a significant winter storm impact the southern states this weekend with heavy snow and ice accumulations. Here on the home-front, expect bitterly cold conditions with dry skies. Clouds tonight should keep most areas around zero. That’s frigid in and of itself, but should skies clear, temperatures will easily fall below zero. Very cold conditions remain Sunday.
We’ll back our air flow around to the southwest early next week and this will help give temperatures a big boost by the mid week period. Gusty southwest winds and showers will be with us, as well.
A complex weather pattern will set up to close out the week. The clash of air masses between a sprawling strong arctic high and an equally impressive southeast ridge will be fun to watch, but not to forecast. It’s very possible unseasonably warm conditions of Thursday give way to much colder weather going into next weekend as the arctic high helps “ooze” dense, shallow, cold air south. At the same time, waves of low pressure will move along the pressing arctic front and periods of heavy precipitation will result. Conditions should grow cold enough by Friday into Saturday for the precipitation to fall as an icy mixture of sleet and freezing rain across portions of central Indiana. Stay tuned.
Upcoming 7-Day Precipitation Forecast:
- Snowfall: Trace
- Rainfall: 1.50″ – 2.50″
We note ensemble data is suggesting high latitude blocking tries to develop towards Day 10. Recall this was the missing ingredient in the bitterly cold blasts of air that occurred during the first few weeks of December. Both the GEFS and EPS agree on the increasingly blocky look to the pattern by Day 10. This would help drive a cold, stormy pattern by early January. Instead of storms cutting, we would see more suppression. With a “stubborn” southeast ridge, things could get interesting across the Ohio Valley from a wintry perspective….
We don’t want to jump the gun, but it the positives can “hook up” over the pole, we stand the chance of locking into a rather lengthy cold, snowy regime as we rumble deeper into the heart of winter.
Summary: A rather mild regime remains as we rumble through Christmas before trending more seasonable next week. From a wintry perspective we need to continue to keep an eye on the period around New Year’s Eve/ Day. Confidence continues to increase on the potential of a return of arctic air come early January.
We’ll open the work week with dry and cold conditions, but all eyes will be on the next arctic front by this time. It’ll blast through here the middle of the week with 
The overall set-up is certainly an intriguing one. Cross-polar flow seeds pressing arctic air into the pattern (again, it comes in “waves” over the next couple weeks, each subsequently stronger). What’s of particular interest is the battle that develops between a tag-team of ridges- SW and SE (at times these will put up more resistance than the other). Long-time Hoosiers know that when cross-polar flow gets involved it can “suppress” storms, but rest easy in knowing that the SE ridge will provide resistance. In fact, some across the lower Ohio and TN Valleys may eventually complain that the southeast ridge is providing too much resistance.