When does winter return? (1-8-13)

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(Elizabeth Wicks)

Reported by: Jim Teske

Email: stormteam@9wsyr.com

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Published: 1/08 5:15 pm

Updated: 2/28 9:49 pm

After our first real shot of winter weather around the holidays, the weather in central New York is going into a period of milder weather for the next five or six days. We talked about this at the end of last week in the last blog. It looks like the warmest weather will come this weekend then the start of next week will be a ‘transition’ period where we might cool a bit but we won’t quite be back into true winter just yet.

Trying to time exactly the change in a weather pattern for us beyond 7 days can be a bit tricky but we are starting to see the broad strokes. From what we see now, it looks like we will slip back into winter sometime between Wednesday and Friday next week (January 16-18th) While we don’t see anything on our models that would suggest a big widespread coastal snow maker it does look like cold enough air to cause localized lake effect snow. Here is a comparison of the temperatures at 5,000 feet for this Saturday compared with next Friday.

There has been a lot of chatter out on the internet about what could POTENTIALLY happen after that. A lot of the speculation centers around what is called “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” This occurs up above the main layer of the atmosphere where our weather occurs (the troposphere) and is the new buzz word when it comes to medium range forecasts during the winter. The crux of the theory is when this rapid warming occurs aloft in the stratosphere, changes also take hold down below in the troposphere including high latitude blocking (including around Greenland). The changes, however, don’t really start to manifest themselves until a week and a half or two weeks after the stratospheric warming starts. Another sign of this blocking occurring is the trend showing up on the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index.

This negative trend is usually a sign that high latitude blocking is getting ready to set up.

So the bottom line is that even though we can’t get into specifics that far out in time it sure looks like our short term flirtation with above normal temperatures will be replaced by colder than normal weather the last half of the month. Winter will return....

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