March arrives with a bang! Quite literally, as we had a brief thunderstorm this morning (lightning did some damage at LaGuardia) and can expect more later today. Those two rounds of thunder are courtesy of a powerful low pressure system moving through the Great Lakes. A warm front stretching ahead of the storm was responsible for the earlier thunder, and the storm's cold front will give us another round of showers and thunderstorms this evening. In between frontal passages we should warm up to the upper 60s across the city.
The storm system is deepening as it moves across the Great Lakes and that means we are also in for a couple of windy days. Winds will start gusting out of the southwest tonight. By tomorrow they'll be coming out of the west at a good 20-30 mph, with gusts to 45 mph. Thursday will be sunny, but it will be much cooler with daylight temperatures holding steady in the mid 40s.
This has been a very mild winter, the sixth warmest of all time, including a record warm February, but that doesn't mean it still can't get cold and snowy. An Alberta Clipper will pass through the area late Thursday night, bringing much colder weather on Friday and Saturday. That disturbance could have enough moisture to play with to possibly give us a couple inches of light fluffy snow on Friday. Friday's high will be in the upper 30s and Saturday will be colder still, with a low near 20 and a high in the lower to mid 30s. The cold won't last too long, and temperatures are expected to rebound to the mid 40s on Sunday and mid 50s on Monday.
