Warm(er) Air is Coming

Yet another cold morning with temperatures in the single digits.  6° in Kalamazoo and 8° in Grand Rapids, we have 5°  here in Otsego.  We should see temperatures encroaching 30 today and the 40s tomorrow.

The first image to the left is the visible satellite from yesterday showing the snow cover on the ground.  The second is snowfall so far this month.

Only forecast issue in the near term is for precip type late Thursday across the northern forecast area as colder air filters back in. Model soundings continue to show the moisture is shallow on Wednesday with the DGZ unsaturated and even drizzle appears to be a long shot…so no precipitation in the forecast until Wednesday night.

Model consensus is that the northern and southern streams remain separate through Thursday with Lower Michigan on the northern periphery of the precip shield of a low tracking across the Ohio Valley. Bulk of the precip looks to remain south of the Michigan border and light rain showers across the forecast area, with a change to snow beginning in the afternoon across the higher elevations of the northern tier.

A cold front will push through Thursday night. There will be a strong surge of cold air behind this system. So rain will switch over to snow overnight. This will be followed by a brief period of lake effect snow mainly Friday morning. It will wind down mid day Friday as a surface high builds in. This brief period of snow may put down an inch or less of accumulation mainly along the lakeshore counties.

It will stay cold Friday into Saturday, but then we will see another warming trend starting Saturday night and continuing into early next week as we get on the backside of the surface high. There could be some very light snow Saturday on the leading edge of the warm advection.

So, in short we will see warmer air which will begin to melt our snow pack which by and large is of low water content.

Looking at the long range models I am not seeing any severe cold shots into the area for most of the rest of the month as our temps should range around normal to slightly above normal.