Iowa Weather Report January 12th 2015: Bottoms Up

BOUNCING OFF THE BOTTOM: Cold arctic high pressure will settle into the state today. It will bring readings down into the single digits and teens for highs across the state. Skies will be mainly sunny with a few clouds over the southern and southeastern counties of the state early on. Tonight the high pressure moves overhead and winds will go calm leading to readings dropping into the single digits and teens below zero for most of the state. Skies will be clear as well which will help as well. We will begin a slow warm up through the rest of the week with temperatures on Tuesday in the upper single digits north through the teens for the rest of the state. A disturbance that will mainly miss the state to the north late Tuesday night and Wednesday morning could bring a flurry in the northeastern counties otherwise skies will be partly to mostly cloudy. We will see readings recover to seasonal levels by Wednesday for parts of the state and Thursday for everyone with even warmer readings as we head toward the weekend.

NEXT WEEK AND BEYOND: The next significant storm looks to move into the state late Sunday night into next Monday. It’s too early to determine what type of precipitation we may get, but at this point it is a storm we’ll watch in the coming days as it draws closer. Looking further into the extended period, the GFS is showing a few significant systems that may impact the state. One is the system mentioned earlier that may linger for through the middle of next week. Another system around the 25th and 26th could bring some snows to the state along with another push of Arctic air for the end of the month. We did see something similar on the model yesterday regarding the arctic air returning at the end of the month, however we’ll watch for this trend to continue in the coming days before our confidence level were to rise for this event.