Get Ready For A Wild and Bitterly Cold January

Firsthand Weather is finally back up and running after being down a couple of months. Everything should be working fine, but just let me know in the comments if you have any issues. As I’ve stated several times over the past few weeks, I appreciate your patience. I know a lot of people depend on our updates, and the whole point of taking the site down was to make it even better! I hope you like it.

Anyways, I want to very briefly get into what can be expected across the United States as we’re about to begin another year, and I’ll do a much more extensive update tomorrow. In other words, I just want to hit the high points tonight. We’re going to be dealing with some major Arctic air that’s going to push southward as we move into this week. As you can see, we already have bitterly cold temperatures in the northern Plains with temperatures down to below negative 30 in parts of northern Minnesota.

Current Temperatures As Of 10 pm EST

We’re going to have one of the most impressive starts to January that we have seen in quite a while, and from what I can see, the first 10 to 15 days are going to be cold and stormy for the eastern United States, which could continue for the entire month. With us going into a negative AO/NAO and neutral/positive PNA pattern, that is going to favor cold in the eastern half of the nation with several winter storms likely taking place.

We’re watching a system this week that’s going to cut across the U.S. dumping snow across northern sections of the country and eventually giving parts of the Northeast their fair share of snowfall. As we move into this weekend and early next week (7 to 9 days out), the forecast models are starting to pick up on a potentially big winter event in that timeframe. The deep South, Tennessee Valley, and on up to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast could get dumped on if this were to pan out, and the only reason that I bring this up is because we’re entering into a pattern that will favor something like this occurring. I’ll have more on all of this in future updates.

One last thing. If you look at the latest run of the Euro, we’re talking record-breaking cold beginning the second week of January. I’m really going to have to study everything a bit more extensively, but this has some areas getting temperatures 40 to 50 degrees below normal. Even if temperatures were 20 to 30 degrees below normal in those regions, we’d still have a very impressive Arctic outbreak on our hands.

Departure from Average Temperatures on January 7th.

It’s really looking to me like January is going to be cold and wild for many across the U.S. Like I said, my goal in this article was to just hit the high points, and tomorrow, I’ll try to bring everything together and make sense out of why all of this is going to occur. That’s all for now. Have a great night!