A Serving of Mashed Models

Thursday, 10:30 a.m.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I trust you are thankful for the many blessings you enjoy this day, whether it be the blessings of family and/or friends, a place to call home, food to eat, a job, and/or anything else you choose to add. I'm pretty much able to say I'm thankful all of the above and so much more, even the freedom we enjoy of living in this wonderful country.

Many will enjoy the typical Thanksgiving Day meal that includes turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, vegetables, pies, rolls, and so much more. In relating that meal the models, there's still a fair amount of disagreement on how things will come out in the wash over the next week or so, and it is truly a testimony to just how difficult a pattern it is. There's a lot of volatility and variability in the pattern, and we're still a few weeks away from the official start to the winter season!

In the short term, the storm over the Southwest is still on schedule, and a piece of that system will squirt out across Texas and bring a growing area of rain to East Texas, eastern Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana late tonight, and across the lower Mississippi Valley into the South and parts of the Southeast tomorrow and tomorrow night.

From there, this moisture will expand to the Southeast to start the weekend and gradually spread northeastward from there later in the weekend. But how this all comes about is still a subject of debate, and it appears pretty likely that it will be later rather than sooner before we see one big storm come together. To get there, we'll probably see a series of smaller disturbances bring more moisture across the Mississippi Valley and through the Ohio and Tennessee valleys over to the Eastern states.

This is likely to result in some snow to end the weekend across many areas along and especially west of the Appalachians, though amounts are in question, and probably will be fairly light for most of these areas. That's not necessarily the case east of the Appalachians.

The area of greatest concern for significant accumulating snows runs from western Virginia and eastern West Virginia up through Pennsylvania into New York and northern and western New England. The I-95 corridor and nearby inland areas probably warm too quickly and miss out on most, if not all, of the snow. In many winter storms that take a path up the Eastern Seaboard like this, though, it's those in between areas that are always in the middle of the mess.

I get the sense in looking at all of the models and their various ensembles that cold is still the main theme going through next week and beyond. How cold is still to be determined, but I'm also beginning to suspect that it's not a persistent brutal cold. Or at least that's what I envision right now. It still looks to be progressive in nature, where you'll through short duration bouts of really cold weather, with intervening warmups that can bring temperatures closer to normal for short periods. The overall theme when you add it all up is still cold, and you could argue that's persistent. But you may go through a 10-day stretch of -5 to -6, and get there by going -10, -9, -5, -2, -1, -6, -9, -11, -5, and -2!

I'm out for the weekend to enjoy time with my family. Have a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving!