January 2010 Weather

Happy New Year!
Now that the holidays are over it's time to get winter kicked off in
ernest, and what better way than with some snow! The upcoming weeks are going to be very interesting in the southern part of the United States with a major pattern change on the way.

The GFS (and the Euro to some degree) have one incredible historic
pattern coming up in our near future. It's still pretty far out and
can't be fully bought into yet, but its trending more and more that
way with each run. The pattern is very similar to the late February/
March pattern of 1960 in which it snowed, then snowed some more, and then snowed some more... well, you get the picture. For about four weeks in 1960 that pattern caused a series of snow events across the south and southeast that just kept coming.

Just an example from Roanoke VA and a study that was done about the record snowfalls:
http://www.easternsnow.org/esc/proceedings/2006/perry_and_konrad.pdf
Feb 13 - 15"
Feb 18 - 8"
Feb 25 - 4"
Mar 2/3 - 17"
Mar 09 - 6"
Mar 16 - 5"

The weather pattern that caused that snow is the same basic pattern
that the models are currently projecting to fall into place beginning
in the 7 - 10 day time frame. Of course, that doesn't mean we will
have the same results as Roanoke, but if you like snow and winter
weather, this is an amazingly good pattern that is brewing and will
most certainly increase our chances for snow dramatically, at least
once and perhaps multiple times over the next 3-4 weeks.

So enjoy the relatively mild (but perfectly normal for January)
weather this week. There is a small chance of rain on Wednesday and
that will be the only weather to speak of until we get closer to the
weekend. We will know much more as the week progresses and as soon as the models can come to some agreement about the upcoming changes, we will let you know, just don't put away the sleds just yet!