How cold is it outside where you are?

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

80 and warm, in contrast to my hometown Chicago with a negative windchill factor

[thumb21]

6 Celsius

[bagelman]

It is now Spring weather, today peaked at 60F.

[Ban my account ffs!]

The tree in front of our house only finally lost all its leaves in mid-December and the buds have already swelled a bit.  This is crazy in contrast to the deciduous trees in northern MN that only get their leaves in mid-late May and lose them in early October.  Some trees don't fully leaf out until early June and then lose them in mid-September.

Winter is coming back, folks.  The pattern is looking like a full polar vortex mode for early February.  The most recent forecasts for day 8 (Feb 2nd) show a "cross polar flow"... as in air from Siberia will be pushed across the polar ice cap into Canada and then down into the central and eastern U.S.

Joe Bastardi's quip about this pattern is "Cross polar flow, look out below!"

This is in deep contrast to the zonal flow of the past couple weeks that has delivered mild air to the eastern U.S. and given us a very nice January thaw.  Northern Minnesota has had the least of the thaw though since it has kinda been on the pivot point of the two patterns that delivered cold first to the east, then the west.  And they'll be going back down into the freezer.

[Ban my account ffs!]

To illustrate this:

This is the pattern for 3 days out (the 28th).  This still has a largely zonal (west to east) flow of air across the U.S. keeping the air mass mild with Pacific ocean air.

The direction of the green lines shows the general direction of the jet stream and air flow moving around the globe in a counter-clockwise fashion.



But by day 8 (Feb 2nd), the pattern switches from zonal (west to east) to meridional (north to south) and much more blocky with a big ridge off the west coast up to Alaska.


Day 11 is similar but with an even bigger ridge off the west coast.  This will keep the west coast dry and the east coast stormy.
 

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

25 °F

[TDAS04]

18°F

[JA]

It's currently 72F (22C) here, but it got to 79F (26C) this afternoon.

[Sirius_]

Today it was 78, a record high.