Warm Weather Continues, Rain/Snow Storm this Weekend

The weather pattern this past week has looked like a rather typical for a winter with El Nino. Arctic Air is locked away in far northern Canada and Alaska, and the storm track is across the southern U.S. The forecasts for this coming week do not look quite as warm as they had looked earlier, but we will still have above-average temperatures in the 20s and 30s.



By this weekend, a storm system will be moving into the central U.S. Initially, with a lack of cold air, this system may produce a mixture of snow, rain/drizzle or freezing rain/drizzle in Minnesota. The combination of mixed precipitation would change to snow as colder air works into the system. This system had earlier looked like a big rainmaker as far north as southern Manitoba, but now it looks to be more snow than rain. Wherever this storm hits hardest, snow amounts would exceed a foot. There's still some chance the storm could stay south of our area, but we'll most likely get our first accumulating snow of 2010.

After next weekend (Jan 23-24), temperatures will return to near normal.