First day of meteorological winter, and the temperatures go and do this:
Then the front came trucking through. Dropping our temperatures between 10 and 15 degrees in a matter of a few hours. Nothing terribly dramatic, but a sign of the cold to come for tomorrow.
With a big bubble of high pressure coming in, I’m not expecting much in the way of recovery tomorrow. 30s will cover it, with a dull, gray sky…that may have the appearance of snow.
And yes, that is a possibility (albeit a minor one) as a warm front moves in. See the Special Map for potential accumulations. Timing the start of this bout of light wintry precipitation is difficult, but it seems that the brunt should fall after 8 or 9pm tomorrow. As temperatures slowly rise through the night, the morning commute looks mostly wet, but there still could be some slippery sidewalks, side streets and parking lots west and northwest of the city.
Payoff here is another mild day Wednesday – although not as warm as today. Highs will top 50 in many spots in Eastern Mass with a few showers in the first half of the day.
Barring any sudden shift in the Polar Vortex to our side of the hemisphere, December overall may turn out to be milder than normal all through the Eastern United States. This is a preliminary forecast and fraught with error in the long range after Christmas, but there seems to be very few signals for colder than normal weather in the East and Midwest. Focus will be for significant rain in California (yeah!) for at least the first half of the month. We’ll watch each one of those storms as they move across the country, but without any cold air to tap, precipitation should be mostly in liquid form.
Pete