Winter's Last Big Gasp To Fade By The End Of The Week

It's still a lot like January out there in much of the nation. Tuesday morning, in places like North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, where spring should be in full swing by now, it's snowing.

Snow on the flowers in Prestonburg, Kentucky this
morning. Photo by Steve Russo via WeatherNation
from Twitter.  

Freeze warnings cover a huge swath of the South, almost all the way down to the Gulf Coast.

And of course we're watching that mega bomb storm forming off the U.S. East Coast, which promises to brush eastern New England with gales and snow, and blast places like Nova Scotia, Canada with one to two feet of snow and winds as strong as hurricane force.

I'm happy to report, though, that this will be the last bout of weather that you can describe as typical for January until late next fall.

Yes, we'll have spring cold waves and snow and freezes to come as we go through April and May.  But the weather will never again feel just like January, at least not until maybe November.

Of course, the milder change in the weather pattern will bring its own set of problems, but overall, it will be a nice switch from the deep freeze.

Places near the Great Lakes and interior New England will have to start watching out for ice jam flooding, or general river flooding if it rains too hard over the next few weeks.

A couple of storms, one Friday and one Saturday, will cross New England with some rain (and a little mixed precipitation)

The snow on the ground needs to what forecasters call "ripen" before it can launch into a full throttle thaw.  That means the initial rains and thaws this weekend won't melt a huge amount of the snow.

So I don't expect a lot of flooding this weekend.  There is a risk of an ice jam or two, but I don't think it will be too bad.

The change in the nation's weather pattern also increases the chances of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes as the storms cross the nation. The storms will have warmer air to play with. Warmer air helps feed violent thunderstorms, so you get into the normal spring tornado season that way.

I don't see any huge tornado outbreaks in the next week or two, but there might be some severe weather over the next few days.

One good thing about the cold this March is it has limited the number of tornadoses. There's only been something like four tornadoes in the nation so far this March, which might mean this month might set a record for the least number of tornadoes in March.

If you're going to have a drought, a tornado drought is the kind to have, for sure.