Posted 11:40 AM EST Wednesday, December 2, 2020
High pressure overhead today and a fresh blanket of snow will bring us a very bright Wednesday. The low sun angle will make sunglasses a necessity if your out and about on this fine winter day. Temperatures will be chilly, though. Afternoon highs locally should reach the upper-30s to around 40° so we will start to see some of that snow melt and area roads drying out.
Snow on the ground and clear skies overnight means temperatures will drop to the mid-20s – and down to the low-20s as you head out Thursday morning.
We’ll have dry weather as well on Thursday. Clouds will increase through the afternoon ahead of the next weather system, though. Tomorrow will also be a couple of ticks warmer and most places will see temperatures in the low-40s.
THURSDAY WEATHER MAPFRIDAY AND THE WEEKEND
The modeling is beginning to get a better picture of our weekend weather. There is still some confusion but basically, a storm system will develop in the Southern Plains on Friday and head east to the Mid Atlantic. At the same time, an upper-level trough in the northeast will travel across the Great Lakes. These two systems will try to merge together on Saturday to form one strong storm system.
Most models keep this system well to our east and along the Mid-Atlantic Coast and up into New England. While the bulk of this storm will miss our area, it’s a big storm.
EUROPEAN MODEL Saturday AMWith the storm mainly off to our east, counterclockwise flow around the low pressure will set up a northwesterly flow in eastern Ohio. That will bring lake effect snow showers to the northeast snow belt counties.
There isn’t a lot of moisture with this, but our area will see an increase in cloud cover as well as low chances for scattered rain/snow showers Friday and the weekend. Whether precipitation is rain or snow will depend on the time of day and temperatures.
Daytime highs will generally run in the low-40s and nighttime lows around 30°. Sunday looks to be the chilliest day of the weekend with highs in the upper-30s.
EARLY NEXT WEEK
The main feature of the longer-term forecast will be the development of a trough over the Great Lakes region. Should this pan out, we can expect cloudy conditions as well as slight chances for occasional showers. Temperatures, however, look to warm a bit as we go through the week.
With daytime highs potentially in the mid-40s, odds are on our side that the majority of any precipitation during the period would mainly liquid.
