Meteorological Muses

Major height falls happen through tonight as a powerful arctic airmass plunges into the region. Through mid afternoon tomorrow we are looking at some significant positive vorticity advection in the upper levels, which is a good diagnostic for upward motion when this advection increases with height. It’s one of the reasons cyclones tend to deepen out ahead of the upper level trough axis. The approach of that vorticity maximum can been seen in the image here:

Image courtesy of http://weather.rap.ucar.edu

With some forcing along the arctic front boundary at the surface to go along with it, I would not be surprised if a snow-squall or two made it to the I-95 corridor during the day on Tuesday.

The other story is the temperatures for this brief but sharp cold snap across the east coast. This image comes courtesy of Dr. Ryan Maue’s site using the 36 hour GFS surface temp anomalies.

From the Northeast widespread all the way down to Florida we see departures of nearly 10 degrees below normal on the Celsius scale, which is really intense compared to what we have seen so far this winter. Of course you can tell that the warmth will be ready to build back in behind it. There are other signs, however that winter may be starting to make a push real soon, in the form of more consistently cold weather and even a possible snow event next week. Stay tuned!