A warm year has ended with some mild days, but 2025 looks as if it will waste little time sliding into a weekslong period of below-normal temperatures we have scarcely seen in the past several winters.
Broad atmospheric shifts throughout the Northern Hemisphere appear poised to bring about a series of Arctic air shots to the central and eastern United States in early to mid-January. High pressure blocking near Greenland and the Arctic Circle plus broad high pressure over western North America look to be coinciding to dislodge bitterly cold air from the polar regions southward, possibly trapping it for several days to a couple weeks over the eastern half of the U.S.
The cold shift starts with a fairly typical cold front on New Year’s Day that will take us back to near-normal 40s highs and 20s lows. Successive Arctic fronts will deepen the cold air over the weekend and next week. Single-digits to teens low temperatures and subfreezing high temperatures appear likely by the second week of January.
Prospects for widespread snow or wintry mix in our region will depend on the details of atmospheric setups that won’t be reasonably well known until a couple of days before a winter storm may occur.
It is probable that there will be at least some snow or wintry mix in our region during the first half of January, given the developing large-scale pattern, with a heightened possibility of a larger winter storm on the table if certain atmospheric pieces line up. There is some chance, though, that the colder period will pass mostly dry, especially if the Arctic air proves so strong that it suppresses storm systems well to the south or crushes them altogether.
There does appear to be a window for a potential wintry precipitation event on or near Monday, Jan. 6, but it is possible the Arctic air will not be fully entrenched until after this system has passed and that it may take a more northern track than is optimum for larger winter storm events in our region. From this distance, however, all such details are highly uncertain, even the existence of a moist storm system at all.
While the 2009 to 2018 period brought several sharp cold periods and large winter storms to our region after many prior years of mostly weak winters dating to the late 1990s, truly wintry periods have been sparse in Southwest and Southside Virginia since the 2019-20 winter. Beyond some sporadic mostly marginal and mixed wintry precipitation events in the 2020-21 winter, a pretty cold January 2022 with a pair of moderate winter storms, a briefly frigid Christmas week in 2022 and a week last January with snow for most of our region followed by Arctic chill, there hasn’t been much wintry about our winters since a widespread foot-plus snowstorm in early December 2018.
With December having averaged a degree or two below normal in much of our region and the first half to two-thirds of January, at least, looking likely to tilt cold, this winter is at least feeling more like winter. We’ll see if there is enough snow to make it look more like winter in the days and weeks ahead.
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:
