If you think it was frigid last week, it’s going to be downright”brutal” in much of the nation this week, according to a short-termweather forecast issued by Salomon Smith Barney.

For this week, Salomon Smith Barney has predicted that a”massive Arctic air mass surging from the Polar regions” will hitthe United States. “This air mass is extremely impressive and isexpected to be in the range of about 1,050 MB [millibars] when itmoves into the Northern Rockies. This is easily in the category ofa Polar Pig,” said meteorologists Jon B. Davis and Mark Russo. Apig is the “ultimate Arctic air mass.”

That means it’s going to be “big time” cold, Davis noted.”…[W]e have not had an Arctic air mass this strong move into thelower 48 during the past four winters,” the Salomon Smithmeteorologists said. The National Weather Service confirmed amassive cold wave would be descending across the nation this week.

“One of the other impressive features of this Pig is that it isvery large geographically and thus will influence a huge area. Infact, when all is said and done, it will influence areas from theWest Coast to Texas to Florida to the East Coast and everywhere inbetween.”

The Salomon Smith meteorologists said their forecast, which theyreleased last Monday, remained unchanged on Friday. “Everything isthe same. The bulk of the cold remains across the western andcentral U.S. The East Coast will get it on the outer fringes,”Russo told NGI. The frigid temperatures will hit the West first,and then move South and East “as you go through the week.”

The weather will be coldest in areas “closest to the initialdelivery point of the air mass — Rockies and Plains. If this airmass is close to 1050 MB, there will be some record-setting cold inportions of the Rockies and the Plains, which is something we havenot had in the middle of winter for a very long time,” said Davisand Russo in their forecast last Monday.

In fact, they predict that temperatures in the region could be15 to 25 degrees below normal throughout the week, and will beaccompanied by “extremely stormy conditions in the Central U.S. astwo major winter storms move out of the southern Rockies toward theGreat Lakes [this] week.” The temperatures in the eastern U.S. willnot be as “extreme” as those in the West, the meteorologists saidin a follow-up forecast. “Even still, much of the eastern U.S. willsee cold weather surge in by later in the week.”

Although the air mass will lose some of its intensity at itmoves south and eastward, Salomon Smith Barney predicts thatbetween Dec. 11 and 16 no area of the nation will have normal orabove-normal temperatures. The meteorologists see another cold airmass moving into the “middle of the country” during the weekend ofDec. 16-17, but they believe it will be less intense.

“Obviously, the middle of December is going to be a period ofexceptionally high heating demand,” they noted. “In fact, the vastmajority of the nation will have above-normal heating demandsduring the next two weeks. This means that the cold pattern, whichbegan during the second week of November, will last at least sixweeks. The U.S. has not had a six-week stretch of cold weather inthe winter since the mid-1990s.”

While last week wasn’t as cold in comparison, it wasn’t anythingto sneeze at either, Russo and Davis said. They had predicted thata “moderately strong Arctic air mass” would descend on the NorthPlains, Gulf Coast and East Coast regions last week — a forecastthat was pretty much on the mark.

Susan Parker

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