Snow Miser and Heat Miser are trading punches far better than Mike Tyson and Jake Paul did.
Record lows for Dec. 6 happened on Friday morning at Lynchburg (13) and Danville (16), with Grayson Highlands dipping as low as 3 degrees, but then it warmed into the 60s for many in Southwest and Southside Virginia by Saturday afternoon. Now, on this Wednesday evening, after Blacksburg and some other locations west of the Blue Ridge scraped 60 on Tuesday, the temperature is plunging back to midwinter-like levels again (30s/40s highs, teens/20s lows) for the next couple of days.
The new cold blast may have arrived quickly enough on gusty west to northwest winds that some of you in Cardinal News country west of the Blue Ridge may have seen some snow a little earlier today at the end of a much-needed soaking rain.
Then, it warms up again into next week, before — possibly — chilling out again by Christmas. We’ll get back to that.
Generation X kids like me — who also remember when Tyson would have dropped Paul into a gelatinous mass in the corner inside of two minutes — grew up on Rankin/Bass stop-motion animation each Christmas season. NBC recently put its “Today” cast in pajamas to celebrate the return of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to that network after some 50 years. But for a young weather geek like me, it was the battle between the Miser brothers — Snow Miser and Heat Miser — that was most captivating. (Yes, I also mentioned this a couple of years ago in this space.)
In “The Year Without a Santa Claus,” the jolly old elf is ailing and in need of some warmer weather at his North Pole abode. Mother Nature hammers out a deal between her warring sons, Heat Miser and Snow Miser, in which Heat Miser brings a warm day to the North Pole, to help Santa recuperate, in trade for Snow Miser being allowed to bring a joyful Christmas season snow to the kids of Southtown.
Unintentionally, this plot point is a metaphor for the Arctic Oscillation. When high pressure and a bubble of relative warmth build over the North Pole, it pushes the jet stream farther southward, and cold air can penetrate very far to the south in the deeper dips of that jet stream.
That “warmth” isn’t actually enough for Santa to get any balmy relief. One thing the cartoon gets wrong is that the sun isn’t shining over the North Pole in winter; instead, it’s in the middle of a 179-day night. A “warm day” in winter at the North Pole might be something above zero. But the higher air pressure is still enough to dislodge colder air southward. That cold air, even when extreme, also isn’t the same at lower latitudes as it would be at the North Pole — it moderates the farther south it spreads, but dropping below freezing multiple days in the South can be quite significant.
The irony is that any of our colder periods at our latitude require it to be warmer someplace it is usually cold. High pressure over Greenland buckles the jet stream southward behind it over the eastern U.S. High pressure building over western Canada and Alaska helps pile-drive colder air into the eastern United States.
In an Arctic outbreak across the central and eastern U.S., it’s fairly common for folks to drop jaws in amazement at the idea that Tallahassee can be colder than Anchorage, but that’s actually a feature of the system, not a bug. It would be hard-pressed to be below freezing in the Florida Panhandle if it’s not unseasonably warm in Alaska.
The Heat Miser-Snow Miser treaty is also vaguely similar to the concept of sudden stratospheric warming, a phenomenon eagerly watched for by winter fans and weather geeks in which warming temperatures high in the atmosphere over the Arctic circle result in the polar vortex splitting, and a piece of it being dislodged farther southward, bringing cold air to some portion of the Northern Hemisphere depending on how the various other oscillations and overall weather pattern are playing out.
So what does any of this have to do with our weather, currently or in the near future?
First, the alternation between mild and cold weather presently indicates a pretty turbulent and unsettled weather pattern that has, at the least, helped spark a much-needed rain that will ease some of the resurgent dryness and, hopefully, will help douse a big wildfire in the St. Mary’s Wilderness near Stuart’s Draft in Augusta County.
It’s not the “get-and-stay” patterns — getting and staying warm or cold, neither of which happens very often in our winters, even particularly cold or mild ones on the whole — that bring about much precipitation, wet, icy or white. Juxtaposed warm and cold air masses are where dynamic storm systems form. It just depends on where you are relative to that boundary whether you end up with storms, cold rain, or wintry stuff.
Down the road, there are mixed signals that need to be sorted about where the weather pattern goes after what is likely to be a relatively mild period next week.
Some modeling is showing high pressure building over western North America that would suggest colder air may try to surge, or at least ooze, into the eastern U.S. close to Christmas.
It will all come down to the deal-making between milder air intruding into places that are usually colder and how much that allows colder air to move our way. Hopefully, we’ll have some idea by next week where this will land and how it may affect your holiday travels.
Something tells me Snow Miser may have more punches in his repertoire than the last couple of wintry boxing matches.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
