Thanksgiving Weather Forecast

With Thanksgiving around a week away, it’s time to begin taking a stab at the forecast. Over the next seven days, a parade of storm systems will ride along an active Pacific jet stream into the Pacific Northwest. These various shortwaves will dig southeastward into the Rockies, inducing the development of a couple of surface low pressure systems that will deepen over the Plains next week. Such a scenario will help maintain a trough over the western half of the U.S., while ridging will attempt to build across the eastern third of the U.S. downstream of the trough around Thanksgiving.

Confidence is relatively high that an active pattern will persist across the Pacific Northwest before and during the Thanksgiving holiday. This pattern will favor snowy conditions across the Cascades and the Rockies next week. On Thanksgiving Day or the day before, the Sierra Nevada Mountains may have accumulating snowfall thanks to a shortwave that could manage to dig as far south as Northern California. Overall, the pattern will favor snow falling as far south as the mountainous regions of Arizona and New Mexico. Cities just outside of the Rockies like Denver, CO and Cheyenne, WY will receive accumulations, as well. In other words, if you’re wanting to have at least a couple decent shots at seeing snow around Thanksgiving, head west!

Ridging will likely try to hang on across the Southeast and along the eastern U.S. coast. Thus, any storm system moving in from the West will trek northeastward across the Great Plains before reaching the Great Lakes region. This will leave the southeastern U.S. and East coast with wet conditions ahead any cold front that moves through the region. I don’t anticipate any frozen precipitation falling south of a line that extends from northern Oklahoma/Texas Panhandle to Kansas/Missouri. The Dakotas, Nebraska, the Midwest, and Great Lakes will be fair game for heavy winter precipitation next week. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio should expect an active pattern throughout Thanksgiving week, but uncertainty remains low in regard to how much frozen precipitation will occur across those states. I will address those probabilities on a system-by-system basis next week.  

Temperatures across the Mid-south, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and even New England will likely be quite volatile over Thanksgiving week due to the storm track. Although a couple of cold fronts will likely move through most of these regions, warm air advection will occur ahead of any storm system that treks across the Great Plains and Great Lakes region. Mostly, conditions will alternate between cool/wet and seasonably cold/dry. In other words, the pattern will remain active during Thanksgiving week across these regions, and I currently can’t guarantee that many won’t experience cloudy and wet weather on Thanksgiving Day.

Please consider joining our Facebook Support group for only $4.99 a month, where we provide detailed, long-range forecast discussions on the upcoming weather conditions across the United States.

The featured image used in this article is courtesy of @thesmartease.