Watching The Cold Unfold

The Thursday morning ABC 33/40 Weather Xtreme video is available in the player below, and on iTunes:

All eyes remain on the brutally cold air over the northern part of the continent this morning; some of the is now moving across the U.S./Canadian border. Cutbank, Montana as of 6:00 a.m. reports six below zero with a wind chill of 32 below. As the upper trough continues to develop out west, that cold air will flood the western half of the nation during the next 48 hours.

We note Las Vegas is under a winter storm watch; you don’t see that too often. Snow is likely over much of Utah, Colorado, and northern Arizona and New Mexico.

Ahead of the cold air, a band of rain will develop from Texas to the Great Lakes, and on the shallow edge of the cold air some real icing problems are likely by Friday and the weekend for a good park of Oklahoma up into northwest Arkansas and Missouri. Ahead of the cold front, flooding problems could develop from Dallas to Little Rock to Louisville, where some places might see over five inches of rain in coming days.

WHAT ABOUT ALABAMA? All of this big mess will generally stay northwest of Alabama through Sunday. We will warm up on a daily basis, with temperatures near 70 over the weekend. I guess we can’t rule out a few isolated showers, but most of the weekend will be dry and mild with some decent intervals of sunshine.

The main band of rain and storms will finally push in here late Sunday night into Monday. SPC still has much of Alabama in a severe weather risk with this; looks like the last two systems with low CAPE and high shear… we will keep an eye on it.

A COLD CHANGE: Much colder air will move in here during the middle of next week. Based on the numbers up north now, we figure we will really have a hard time getting out of the 30s Tuesday and Wednesday. Yeah, I know, the 00Z GFS MOS shows highs in the 40s on those days, but it really struggles with shallow cold air and I think it will bust by at least 10 degrees. So, we will mention highs in the 30s and lows in the 20s for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Yep, some moisture will run up and over the cold air, so clouds will be around, but the degree of overrunning remains to be seen, and the models look fairly dry. We might have some issues with ice at some point next week somewhere across the Gulf coast region, but that isn’t the big deal. The big deal is the cold weather. Get ready for it…

LONG RANGE: Frequent cold air shots seem to be the story during the latter half of January. Sure, we will have periods of moderation, but the final weeks of the month sure look cold for much of the continental U.S. Winter is just beginning, you know…

LOTS OF WEATHER NEWS over on weatherparty.com. Be sure and register and you can submit stories and vote on them to determine what shows up on the main page. Pretty cool site.

ON THE ROAD: J.B. Elliott and I will hit the road today; we will be in Clanton at Noon; from there we go to Jackson, Mississippi for an NWA/AMS local chapter meeting tonight. We have lots of friends over there and look forward to the visit; the guys at the Jackson NWS office do a wonderful job, and we sure pay close attention to their work since our signal covers a good part of East Mississippi. Brian Peters and Bill Murray will be covering for us, and I thank those gentlemen in advance for allowing us the time to make the trip. Brian will have the afternoon Weather Xtreme video today; my next video will be posted by 7:00 a.m. tomorrow. Enjoy the day!

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