And-we-freeze

Super cold here in central NC and over pretty much the entire eastern half of the U.S. There's a big deep low over Nova Scotia which is funnelling down the cold Arctic air. As a result most of the U.S. is 10-20 degrees below normal. Doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. Here's a plot showing the model-predicted back trajectories for Wed morning in Raleigh. The airmass that will be here then is just south of Hudson Bay right now. Ugh.

One of the cool things that I've seen recently in weather forecast discussions lately is the idea of analog events. Now that we have 40-60 years of pretty good meteorological data, forecasters can compare present weather patterns against historical ones ... find the best matches (or analogs) ... and use those historical "twins" to make the forecast. Some of the analogs over the past week have been from Jan 1977.

Growing up in Louisville, Dolberry was fascinated w/ all the accounts of people walking across the Ohio River that winter after it froze over. Here's a picture of people doing it in Cincinnati. As far as I can tell, the Ohio freezing over in Louisville hasn't happened since 1978 (there were two very cold winters in a row), though there are some accounts of it historically being a once every 9 year sort of event (in Cincinnati, anyway), so we're way overdue. Think it would take 20-30 days in a row of subfreezing weather for it to happen. So far, Louisville has two straight days w/o getting above 32 and the forecast is for at least eight more ... getting us to 10.  Would be cool if it happened.  That said, Dolberry mapped out our Spring Training trip today in an attempt to at least mentally escape winter's grip. We'll be in FL from the 12th-16th of March.

The only thing that would make the cold more tolerable would be a little snow to mix it up. Hour 126 of this morning's GFS run looks good for a little snow in NC come Friday morning. The DCV will track the model forecasts up to the storm and see how the model's evolve over the next 5-6 days and see if anything interesting comes to pass.

The operational GFS has a developing storm in the right position off SE NC for Apex to see snow (pic 1).  And several other members of the ensemble, but not all, think a low will be in the same vicinity (pic 2).