After not falling below freezing since March 29th of last year, the temperature in Central Park has now stayed below 32 degrees for more than two days, with yesterday being the coldest day since the icebox days of last February. Could the last couple of days be the coldest of the winter or is even colder weather on the way? AccuWeather seems to think so, threatening us with the polar vortex and Arctic air next week.
Before we get to the chill let's bask in some relatively warm weather for the remainder of the week. The high pressure system responsible for the recent cold snap continues to drift southward and that will let us warm to near 40 this afternoon. Our three days of colder than normal weather ends tomorrow as the high should reach the mid 40s under sunny skies. More of the same is expected on Friday was we'll still be under the influence of a dry air mass.
The weekend forecast gets messy. It's a long story, but the energy from another in a string of El Niño-enhanced storms dumping loads of precipitation on the West Coast is expected to cross the Rockies, soak up some juicy moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, and form a new storm over Texas that will eventually move toward us. The end result will be a warm, wet weekend. The chance of rain will increase throughout the day Saturday, with the high reaching the upper 40s. The best chance of rain will be Saturday night and all day Sunday. Sunday's high could reach the mid 50s, if not a bit closer to the record of 60 degrees set in 1876.
A cold front on Sunday night followed by our first Alberta Clipper of the season on Monday night will usher in an extended period of cold weather next week.
The arrival of the cold weather is right on time climatologically as the gray line of the graph shows the coldest days of the year run from January 13th to the 20th (although several days on either side of those dates aren't much warmer). That gray line represents a 30-year average that's been smoothed to get rid of any noise in the data.
The average for the past few years and this winter's trend, the blue and red lines, show a different pattern, with the coldest weather not arriving until later in January and staying cold through the end of February. As for AccuWeather's scary Polar Vortexmongering, well, that's the dashed line which looks pretty close to normal for the next couple of weeks.
