Mar 30, 2012; 10:05 AM ET
Friday, 11:30 a.m.
March will go down in the record books as one of the warmest ever. No doubt it will absolutely smash monthly records in a lot of places, particularly across the Midwest and northern Plains. Places such as Sioux Falls, Des Moines, Minneapolis and Chicago are all more than 16 degrees above normal for the month, with only two more days to go into the books. That's an average of 16 degrees per day! How wild is that?
Records have been destroyed all over the place: the most 80-degree days in March in Chicago and the warmest ever in March in Caribou, Maine. Record highs have been set in Florida, up and down the East Coast, as well as in the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, the Tennessee Valley, the Plains and the Rockies.
And we're not done seeing records get erased. At least two more warm surges are left in this pattern before we can put a little sanity back in the pattern. The first of these is already blossoming over the Rockies, where it will challenge a record in Denver this afternoon with sunshine. By tomorrow, they should pretty easily beat their existing record, and I suspect many more places over the eastern Rockies and out onto the Plains will do the same. Look at the GFS ensemble projected anomalies for tomorrow:
Keep in mind that is the composite average of many individual ensemble runs, so in extreme events, those extremes may be tempered by some lower individual members. This means it could be even farther above normal in more places that what that image is suggesting!
This warm surge will quickly cross the Mississippi Valley into the Midwest on Sunday, even leaking into the western Ohio Valley. Little of this warmth will reach the Northeast, though even there at least one day will get pretty warm next week, probably Tuesday, and perhaps even Wednesday until a cold front passes.
That front is tied to a strong upper-level trough that will crash onto the West Coast tomorrow into tomorrow night:
By Wednesday, that same trough will push a cold front to the East Coast. While that is happening, the cooldown spreading out of the West and through the Rockies onto the Plains early in the week will give way to yet another fast-building upper level ridge:
And that means still another surge of very warm air coming out of the Rockies and into the central northern Plains. Look at the projected anomalies for Thursday:
This warmth will again progress downstream on Good Friday into the Ohio Valley, and it will slowly warm heading into Easter weekend in the East, though not to the extent the Plains and eastern Rockies will get to experience.
We'll have to wait until the following week to see more definitive signs of a pulling back from this very warm pattern across the country. Until then, many parts of the country will continue to run weeks ahead of normal as far as temperatures are concerned.
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