Springtime Warmth Envelopes Most Of Nation, But Watch Those Winds And Wildfires!

There's a very high danger of wildfires today in the areas
of this map shaded in orange, and especially
in those areas in red and pink.

Where I live in St. Albans, Vermont, there's a typical February winter chill this morning.

The temperature is hovering around 10 degrees, there's an icy northwest breeze and some snow flurries are just tapering off.

My location is pretty much an exception for the nation.  Quite a huge warm wave is enveloping much of the nation this week.

The southern and central Plains are ground zero for this heat wave, where many record highs will fall today and tomorrow. High tempertures will reach the 80s as far north as Kansas and the 70s as far north as western South Dakota.

This is February, people!

HEAT, FIRES AND WIND

The big news with this heat is the extreme fire danger today in much of the southern Plains. In some areas, especially the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the relative humidity will be an incredibly dry 5 to 10 percent, winds will gust over 30 mph and there will be those record high temperatures.

You can see why there's such a critical fire danger in this area. Let's hope we don't get any boneheads setting their brush piles ablaze today, or throwing their cigarette butts out the car window.

Almost the whole western half of the nation is windy today. High wind warnings are widespread through the Rockies, western Plains an parts of California and Oregon.

There might even be one or two springlike severe thunderstorms in northeastern Utah, southern Wyoming and northwestern Colorado today.

SPREADING EAST

The warmth will spread east over the next couple of days, and will flush the seasonably cold air out of New England by the weekend.

I don't expect record highs in the eastern United States this weekend like there are in the Plains now, but temperatures will probably reach the 50s as far north as southern New England and get well into the 40s in places like northern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire.

In northern New England, maple sugaring season normally starts in very late February and early March, but it has been going since early February. And it looks like another sap run in the maples is coming this weekend.

BUT IT'S STILL WINTER

If you think spring is here with these warm temperatures, forget it. Signs are pointing to some sort of storm along the Eastern Seaboard around the middle of next week.

The atmospheric energy that would create this storm is still way out over the Pacific. There's not much opportunity to gather much data from a system that's over there, which makes it hard right now to predict what kind of storm will gather in the United States.

But there's an increasing chance that somebody in the Northeast is going to get another snowstorm, somewhat like last week, when parts of western New York got buried in a foot and a half of snow. (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, set a 24 hour snowfall record with 20.7 inches in that storm.)

It's still way too soon to tell which area of the Northeast, if any, will get a snowstorm, but we need to keep watching this one to see what will happen.  We'll know more once the ingredients to this potential storm hit the western United States in two or three more days.