Bitter Cold Surge Expected This Weekend

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Bitter Cold Surge Expected This Weekend
9AM EST, December 31, 2003

Frigid air covering a small part of the
northern Plains and upper Mississippi
Valley on Wednesday morning was
only the tip of the iceberg.
Though this frigid air will fade out late
this week, another much colder air
mass was spilling south from Alaska
into central Canada and will make its
presence felt in parts of the U.S. by this
weekend.

Early Wednesday morning, a
WeatherBug live sensor in Ellendale,
ND reported -2 degrees with a wind
chill of -17 while a site in Fergus Falls,
MN had -4 with a wind chill of -15 .
The colder air was being driven in by a
storm over the Great Lakes which had
a strong push of northwest winds
behind it. The storm brought a band of
1 to 4 inches of snow from North
Dakota into northern Minnesota and the
upper peninsula of Michigan.
Behind the storm, cooler air had
pushed as far south as western
Kansas, where locations that soared to
near 60 yesterday will hold in the upper
40s and low 50s.

The mother lode of cold air featured
temperatures as cold as 40 below zero
on the northwest side of Hudson Bay in
central Canada.

It is unlikely that temperatures will get
this cold in the U.S., but a large piece of
this mother lode is expected drop south
into the northern Rockies and northern
Plains by late Friday. Long range
forecast models show a substantial
cooldown reaching the Midwest and
Northeast by the end of the weekend.
Those forecast models also hint that a
wave of low pressure will form on the
boundary between the colder air and
the remaining mild air, bringing the
potential for wintry precipitation in the
Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and northeast
late in the weekend into early next
week.