Update: Freezing Drizzle Warning now Ended —– Freezing drizzle threat continues. Possible flurries tonight. Will Thursday be a snow day?

Update 11AM: EC has now ended the Freezing Drizzle warning. It expect it may return, or possibly be a freezing rain warning, tonight or tomorrow and moisture comes back and temperatures stay at or below freezing.

While there is no moisture in the area at the moment, and I didn’t see any accumulation of ice on the car this morning, the freezing drizzle warning remains.

I expect the morning to stay dry, but by sundown, some more precipitation will creep into the area.

Freezing Drizzle / light snow Before 4PM

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Showers / light snow Before 7PM

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Please drive carefully today conditions are likely to change rapidly.

Tomorrow morning we have the potential to see actual snowfall. We will have a kind of strange pattern where the rain will be wrapping around the the Valley but not penetrating into it.

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Wednesday will bring with it warm winds. The question will then become whether those winds get us far enough above freezing before the rains come on Thursday to prevent a “dump and wash” snow and rain scenario. This isn’t something any model can readily predict, it will just come down to our local micro climates. We may end up with a situation where the deeper Valley and Sproat lake get significantly more snow followed by rain than the City close to the water. Or we could all get snow.

The kids will be happy to know that front will arrive in the wee hours of Thursday morning… We should have 6 hours of solid precipitation of some sort by 7AM Thursday so we should definitely know what the situation is before the kids have to get out the door.

Fingers crossed!20131210-070817.jpg

Oh and Al and Sharon have claimed Wednesday and Thursday respectively for the snow contest! Good luck! 🙂

Finally, as we shiver down here near the 49th parallel, much like last winter, the “polar” extremes of Alaska and Florida are experiencing extreme warmth.

Unusually extreme ridges of high pressure set up over Alaska and the Southeast United States to compensate for the big dip in the jet stream over the center of North America. One ridge of high pressure pushed to the north of Alaska and over the Arctic Ocean, allowing warm Pacific air to bring rain and temperatures in the upper 30s to Alaska’s North Slope on Sunday—an unprecedented occurrence in December. Keep in mind that this is an area that has been in perpetual 24-hour darkness for several weeks. According to wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt, it appears that Sunday’s 39° [3.9°C] at Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) is the warmest December temperature ever measured at any site on the Alaskan Arctic Ocean shoreline region. Weather records for Alaska’s North Slope go back as far as 1921 at Point Barrow. A very sharp ridge of high pressure also set up over the Southeast U.S.—Tallahasse, Florida hit 84° [28.9°C] on Saturday, matching their highest temperature ever recorded in the month of December.

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