Saturday Night Wx Update

Good Saturday evening, everyone! I wanted to give you an update on next week’s forecast, as I know many of you have plans and are interested in what the weather will hold.

Dangerously Cold Air Coming

First of all, the main headline is the cold air coming. That cold air now looks to arrive Thursday afternoon or evening. That timing could change somewhat but confidence is increasing in the cold air arriving after noon on Thursday. Temps will plunge when that front moves through. Let me repeat that….temps will plunge when that front comes through. Afternoon highs will likely top out in the lower 40s on Thursday and bottom out around 5-10 degrees Thursday night! That is a serious plunge, folks.

Please make sure your pipes are protected (ask someone if you’re not sure. You do NOT want to deal with bursted pipes), make sure your neighbors are ready (esp if they are elderly or disabled), and make sure the outdoor fur babies and farm animals are dry and out of the wind when this comes in. Make sure your vehicles are ready for this, too.

Once temps go below freezing Thursday night, we won’t get above freezing again until at least Christmas Day. We may not get out of the teens for highs on Friday and we’ll struggle to get to the 20s for highs on Saturday.

PLUS, there will be a breeze when this cold air is here. That will send the “feels-like” temperature below zero.

Snow Chances

Confidence in light snow is increasing for Thursday night and Friday. At this time, and things could change, confidence is increasing for about 1-3 inches of snow. While that doesn’t sound like a big snow, we all know it only takes a little bit of snow to make great big problems on the roads. I’ll monitor this closely, but I’m feeling pretty good about us getting some light snow from this system, which is pretty typical with arctic fronts this time of year.

Take Care in What You Share

Tis the season for snow hype but please take care in what you share on social media. Meteorologist James Spann wrote a blog about hype forecasts a few years ago and he wrote:

“Most weather enthusiasts don’t understand societal impacts of what they write. Write a good clickbait headline, and you can get thousands and thousands of shares. It will spread across Facebook like wildfire. Good for them getting all those likes and clicks, but do they think about the real human impact?

A mother with a child suffering from chronic kidney disease is scheduled for peritoneal dialysis in 2 weeks. After seeing the Facebook headlines, she begins to call wanting to reschedule for before or after the “snow storm” coming her way. A delay in dialysis could bring health complications.

A trip is cancelled to see an aging parent, who doesn’t have long to live, due to the potential for a big snow storm in 2 weeks.”

Just take care in what you share, folks. I could share hype posts and get tons of clicks and shares and probably make at least $50 on ads on my WordPress blog site in just one day. But I don’t.

This is my final statement on hype for this season. lol I don’t have time to debunk forecasts when it’s all I can do keep up with mine. haha

Interesting info

The warmest Christmas on record for the plateau was in 2015 when we hit 68 for an afternoon high. Our morning low was only 61 degrees that day, making it the warmest Christmas morning on record.

The Christmas of 2015 was also the wettest, with 2.61 inches of rain falling.

The coldest temperature ever recorded on Christmas on the plateau was -7 in 1983. That day’s high temp was only 8, making that the absolute coldest Christmas on record.

The most snow ever to fall on Christmas Day was 7 inches in 1969. The Christmas of 1963 had the most snow on the ground when Christmas arrived, with 10 inches being measured across the plateau.

Thank You

Thank you for trusting me with your weather, friends. I have worked hard to earn that trust over the past five years. I won’t always get it right, but your trust is well-placed in me because when you put your trust in me, you’re also trusting a whole hosts of meteorologists that I consult, along with a slew of weather model data, my education, experience growing up on the plateau (including what I learned from Steve Norris), etc.

If NASA tusts me to cover rocket launches you can trust me to make a forecast (ha). I look forward to sharing more of those launches with you all in this coming new year! Stay tuned!

I’m also grateful that our county emergency services trust me with their weather data. That opportunity is such an honor for me to take on.

On a very cool note….The blog now has more tahn 14,000 followers! More than 375,000 visitors to my website have been recorded, along with 730,000 views! To date (counting this one), I have made 3,491 posts. Thank you for following along! You all rock!

(FYI, a YouTube recording will be coming out in about an hour (thank you, Frontier, for your speediness..lol), so go to  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3zLMT7tqpb6eIaE-8YGog to access that or subscribe to the page to be notified of those updates. Thank you !)