Looking way ahead

More typical November weather has arrived. Through the next week or so there will be pushes of somewhat milder air and instrusions of colder air right where one would expect it to occur, over the upper Midwest. The decreasing hours of daylight are positioning the atmosphere to a battle ground that transitions from autumn to winter.

If you recall, Paul Huttner posted on this blog on October 29th that the long range models indicated a potential snow storm on the 13th of November. The models toyed with the meteorologists for a period of time, before finally locking in and maintaining the confidence that snow was likely in Minnesota last Saturday.

Well let's try this long range outlook stuff again. Here's an image from the GFS model of the surface pressure pattern and two meter temperatures for 6am Thanksgiving morning. That magenta color you see over the Dakotas paints sub-zero temperatures.

For now there will be spritzes of precipitation over southern Minnesota today. Overcast skies are likely to keep the maximum temperature from reaching forty, the normal daily high, in the Twin Cities.

CE