New Year’s Eve Weather and Weekend Ice Storm

It has been a very quiet and mild December. There really wasn’t much to talk about weather-wise to highlight for you. In those cases, just put on the cruise control and use my free weather app, ATsWeatherToGo, available on Apple and Google App stores, to give you your daily backyard forecast. However, all of that is about to change…
January is going to come roaring in with arctic air and even some ice and snow. Long range the cold pattern should continue for most of the month with a more active zonal Jetstream setting up for the second half which may lead to better opportunities for winter precipitation.
Up first a quick mention that our New Year’s Even weather will be quiet under mostly clear skies and light north winds. Temperatures will be cold at midnight as you might expect.

Then we focus on the Jetstream pattern. This change will bring some lift to the C/S Plains Sunday morning (red/yellow region) and also allow more cold air to drop south out of Canada. Watch the temperature anomalies for the US over the next 2 weeks to see how those cold (blue areas) hang around and get reinforced.


Putting the upper disturbance and the cold air together yields the maps below. It is still early and details will be worked out over the coming days, but as of now, looks like significant snow for Kansas, and significant ice for N OK. The potential is for that ice accumulation to drift south to the greater OKC area Sunday morning. Arctic fronts like to sag a little more south than models indicate. So it might be a little icy on the roadways across half of Oklahoma this coming Sunday. The European was used for this preview and it also favors some wrap-around snow for NE OK, while the model consensus is just a dusting or flurries at best.





If all of the precipitation remained unfrozen, it would be some decent rainfall totals according to the European model.

Speaking of winter weather, we may see a little more snow the following week. The European model has several ensemble members indicating snow for OKC. This also translates to other areas of the state as well. You read this as each line is a model. If it’s blank, no snow. If it has a number, that’s the amount of snow it thinks will fall. Where the color in each line starts lines up to the date/time period at the bottom.

Finally, I hope you took advantage of the mild temperatures because the deep freeze is coming. I expect the temperatures towards the end of this outlook will need to be adjusted downward for Sunday and the following days. Stay tuned! -AT
