Feb 21, 2012; 10:58 AM ET
Tuesday, 11:30 A.M.
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. That makes today Mardi Gras, and there are many festivities going on today around the world in preparation for the Lenten season. Among those festivities are many parades, and as I was looking at the weather from a large scale perspective, it struck me how storms are just lined up one behind another, ready to parade in from the Pacific and across the country, then out into the Atlantic. Hence, the title of today's post.
The first one we see in play today is actually a one-two punch of systems, seen here in the afternoon 500mb forecast from the 12z NAM:
This is driving a large area of clouds from the Midwest through the Lakes and Ohio Valley into the mid-Atlantic and New England. There has been and will continue to be some rain and wet snow with it, but snow amounts from here on in will be rather minimal, and most places won't get much more than a tenth of an inch of rain.
There will be another far weaker disturbance zipping across the Plains into the Ohio Valley tonight and tomorrow, but it'll be starved for moisture. Plenty of clouds will streak eastward, but rain will be lacking, generally little more than spotty showers, and most of those form the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys on east.
The next bigger storm will move across the Northwest tomorrow, dragging a cold front through Washington into Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. It will be quite mild ahead of it, with some showers, but snow levels will be coming down behind it late tomorrow and tomorrow night. The storm that emerges over the Dakotas tomorrow evening will then move into the Midwest tomorrow night, and into the Great Lakes Thursday. Look for it drag some very mild air out of the Plains and into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. Any remaining snow will be wiped out with temperatures in the 50s and 60s. And it wouldn't shock me at all to see a few 70-degree readings show up in Virginia Thursday, perhaps to Washington, D.C.!
While NAM has for some reason backed off on the idea of severe with and ahead of the cold front tied to this storm from Southeast Texas into the Lower Mississippi Valley late Thursday and Thursday night into Friday, I guess I am still of the opinion it'll be there when push comes to shove.
There's no blocking downstream over the Atlantic, so this storm will race across the Northeast Friday, pulling a cold front off the Northeast coast. Meanwhile, as the first storm is exiting, stage right, here comes another, stage left:
This storm will be able to pull colder air southward from Canada this weekend, and the GFS ensembles are painting a very cold picture for Sunday:
And if you think the parade ends there, think again, my friend. They really are lined up back across the Pacific, and that means more systems likely to crash onto the West or Northwest coast and coming across the country. But this may be one of the few things about this weather pattern that is normal
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