Hopefully you’ve enjoyed our one “warm” day this week, as today we climbed into the lower to middle 20s, tomorrow we look for a “warm-up” day as we dip to a high near 15 degrees, and then Saturday we ring in 2022 with temps well below zero and struggling to make it close to zero for a high. Yikes.
As colder air moves in on Friday, that’s when we see the chance for some additional snow — likely somewhere near 0.5″ in the Twin Cities. Here’s the future radar Friday afternoon around 2-3 p.m.:
The high resolution models really pinpoint this as a 1-2″ snow event on the high end, with 0-1″ for areas like Hennepin and Ramsey Counties:
After that, the bottom drops out temperature-wise. The story starts with a significant trough, our dip, in the jetstream layer. As that trough moves over Minnesota it allows significantly colder air to settle in:
If you look at that dip indicated in the image above, then switch to the temperatures about a mile up, you can easily see the correlation over Minnesota:
The end result of that cold air moving in and limited warming? High temps over all of Minnesota that stay below zero all day long.
If we fast-forward to around 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, here are the temperatures forecasted by the short-term models:
That’s around -2° near the Twin Cities and -5° near Brainerd, with temps already near double digits below zero closer to Ely and International Falls and into North Dakota. Yikes.
Thankfully the cold is quick-moving, so we’ll warm up slightly on Sunday and back into the 20s on Monday and Tuesday — but there’s another shot of these exact temperatures coming in for next weekend as well. Stay tuned!
