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Bastardi Sees January Deep Freeze for U.S.
Following record-cold December temperatures, AccuWeather.com chief long range forecaster Joe Bastardi said he sees the frigid trend extending coast-to-coast through mid- to late January.
Bastardi said this could be the coldest January for the nation since 1985. He said the country has not experienced coast-to-coast extremely cold temperatures since the 1980s.
The forecaster noted that record-smashing cold has already been gripping a large portion of the West since Jan. 1 with snow falling in Las Vegas last week. Arctic air has also made a return to the northern Plains, while the East and South experienced dramatically cooler temperatures last week.
A wave of frigid winter air forecast to sweep out of northwestern Canada and Alaska this week could bring single-digit and below-zero high temperatures to much of the United States through the third week of January, AccuWeather.com said Thursday.
The East, South, Midwest, Plains and Pacific Northwest areas will all feel the effects of the cold air mass, which will bring low temperatures that “will prove to be dangerous, if not life-threatening, where wind becomes involved,” the forecasters said.
The Jan. 10-20 period is when Bastardi said he expects cold temperatures to take hold around the nation, with the northern Plains experiencing the worst of diving thermometers.
Chicago and Omaha are forecast to only achieve high temperatures below zero during that time, and only for a day or two. People in New York City could be in for one day with highs in the teens, while temperatures could fail to rise out of the 20s in Dallas, TX, and Jackson, MS, for one or two days.
In the Northwest, Bastardi noted that there is the potential for rare snow in Seattle and Portland in the upcoming weather pattern.
In October Bastardi worried that a then-predicted “quick start to winter in the East” would frighten residents there into thinking there would be another blizzard “snowmageddon,” such as what hit much of the East last winter (see NGI, Oct. 25, 2010). He said at that time, however, that “much of this winter’s snow will come relatively early in the season.”
Forecasters at Andover, MA-based WSI Corp. had expected warmer-than-normal temperatures across the eastern United States during January and February, with colder-than-normal temperatures taking over by late winter (see NGI, Jan. 3). The emergence of a “more textbook La Nina pattern” was expected to help moderate those late winter temperatures, WSI said.
And forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said they expected the La Nina event in the equatorial Pacific Ocean to bring above-normal temperatures to a huge area stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Mid-Atlantic through February, but said it was less clear how it would affect winter temperatures in the Northeast (see NGI, Nov. 22, 2010).
“No doubt this year’s La Nina is not living up to typical expectations,” AccuWeather.com said. “However, you must remember that, similar to a bell curve in a college course grading system, not everything fits neatly in the middle. Additionally, there are other forces at work in the atmosphere and elsewhere that the meteorological community is just beginning to understand.”
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