DETROIT – As expected, we woke up to temperatures well below zero (-18 degrees Celsius), with top honors…or is that bottom honors?...going to Saline, where the temperature crashed to a bone chilling -15 degrees (-26 degrees Celsius) this morning.
Naturally, wind chills across the area were much colder reaching -24 degrees (-31 degrees Celsius) in some spots.
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By the way, here is an interesting fact to impress your friends with next time you are chatting at the water cooler at work: -40 degrees is the temperature where the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures are the same. Fortunately, we will never experience that here in Detroit.
Clear skies this evening will be followed by increasing clouds overnight. Lows between zero and -5 (-21 to -18 degrees Celsius) will occur this evening, with temperatures then rising after the clouds roll in. Southeast wind at 4 to 7 mph.
After a cloudy start on Tuesday, we should get a few hours of partial sunshine during the midday period, followed by cloudy skies to end the afternoon. We expect a mostly dry afternoon rush hour. There’s just a small chance that a few light snowflakes or patches of freezing drizzle could develop toward the end of the rush.
Temperatures will rise into the mid to upper 20s (-3 to - degrees Celsius) by late afternoon, but keep rising even after sunset. Southeast wind increasing to 10 to 15 mph.
Tuesday’s sunrise is at 7:56 a.m., and Tuesday’s sunset is at 5:35 p.m.
Snow and freezing rain develop Tuesday evening, with an eventual changeover to rain. There could be a dusting of accumulation in the heart of our metropolitan area, but that’ll wash off the road by the overnight rain.
Near and north of I-69, however, you’ll get the longest period of snow before the change to rain, so it’s possible that you get an inch or two of snow.
The only potential fly in the ointment is the dry air overhead that the precipitation will be moving into. As we’ve explained in the past, precipitation falling into dry air evaporates (or sublimates, in the case of snow), and that causes cooling.
If the temp cools more than expected, then we would stay below freezing longer than expected, and snow / ice accumulations would rise. We’ll keep you posted. Temperatures (dependent upon what we just explained) will rise into the low to mid 30s (0 to 1 degree Celsius) by dawn Wednesday.
Rain showers Wednesday morning should end for the afternoon. Highs near 40 degrees (4 to 5 degrees Celsius).
Mostly cloudy Wednesday night, with lows back down into the low 20s (-6 to -5 degrees Celsius).
Mostly cloudy and breezy on Thursday, with some snow showers possible toward the end of the day. Highs in the upper 20s to near 30 degrees (-2 to -1 degree Celsius).
More arctic air on the way
The next batch of Arctic air invades and stays with us Friday through Sunday. Highs will be in the mid teens (-9 degrees Celsius) on Friday, the upper teens (-8 degrees Celsius) on Saturday, and the low 20s (-6 to -5 degrees Celsius) on Sunday. Overnight lows will be in the low teens (-11 degrees Celsius) Friday morning, around 5 degrees (-15 degrees Celsius) Saturday morning, and around 7 degrees (-14 degrees Celsius) Sunday morning.
As for precipitation, a series of upper level disturbances will zip along the jet stream and cross the Great Lakes region from the end of this week all the way into early next week. The computer models are (not surprisingly) not agreeing on these smaller-scale disturbances. What we CAN say right now is that any disturbance will generate snow showers or a period of snow.
If there is any day to target with the best chance for our next noteworthy accumulating snowfall, it appears to be Monday…both the GFS and ECMWF suggest a rather robust upper level system moving through. But this disturbance, as well as all of the others, is currently still out over the Pacific. The models won’t get a better handle on them until they cross the west coast and can be sampled by our land based upper air balloon (radiosonde) network.
Stay tuned.