DETROIT – The temperatures in the 40s felt great, but they’re not coming back anytime soon. Our coldest temperature of the season is just around the corner before some “shovelable” snow.
Frigid turn
Sunshine put highs in the mid-40s on Thursday. Now we’re about to take a frigid turn.
Temperatures drop to the 20s by sunrise Friday and don’t recover in the afternoon. From there, we’ll drop further to a Saturday morning start in the low to mid-teens. That will be our coldest mark of the season.
Highs will rebound a bit Sunday through next week, but getting back to 32 degrees will be a challenge. We might do it only once, on Monday, and for a few hours at that.
Snow issues
We’re fairly confident that we’ll see a few lake-effect snow showers Friday, mainly in the morning. Another batch of scattered snow showers is likely Sunday. Both will feature minor, if any, accumulation.
Then, our attention turns to the Monday system. There’s still quite a bit of disagreement among model runs on the position. That’s the difference between nothing (literally not a flake) and multiple inches that could be closer to one foot than zero.
We’re watching for the development of a strong area of high pressure north of us late this weekend. How strong it becomes and how quickly that moves into place will dictate whether that snowmaker can surge into Michigan or stay south of us completely.
Down the road
New outlooks for February and the next three months are out from federal forecasters. Both show strong signals for above-normal precipitation and above-normal temperatures. So our coming cold snap might not be status quo for the remainder of winter.
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