It's Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil says we are in for six more weeks of winter. Keep in mind the Spring Equinox happens on March 20, about seven weeks from now, so that shouldn't really be a hard prediction to make 🤫 

But is the groundhog right? He doesn't have a great track record. The National Centers for Environmental Information says Punxsutawney Phil is only right 50% of the time.

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Phil might actually be onto something this year, though. Our weather is about to turn sharply colder! Arctic air will be flowing into our region this weekend. If you look closely at the top of the image below, you can see how the coldest air (the pink shades) is moving toward us from the other side of the north pole. We call that "cross-polar flow" which is just a fancy way to say this cold air is coming from the other side of the globe. 

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The air isn't just cold because it's crossing the polar region. Between here and the north pole, the air is also traveling over quite a bit of snow. Snow on the ground helps to cool the air which then continues on its trek toward us. The Saint Louis University CIPS Analog Guidance shows we have about an 85% chance of seeing air colder than normal in the next 6 days. In fact the data for the next 6-14 days all shows colder than normal air, just not quite to that same degree of confidence. 

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The forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center look similar since it's hard to see how that arctic air doesn't influence us. So just how cold will the air be? The long range forecasting models we use have been consistently showing temperatures at least dropping into the teens or maybe even single digits early next week. With that said the European model has been uncharacteristically showing a lot of variability run to run, and the last couple of runs have not been quite as cold in the extended range. 

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Bottom line: the forecast does look cold. We certainly are not done with winter yet. Tune in to WDRB News tonight to hear Marc Weinberg's and Rick DeLuca's forecast for how far temperatures drop early next week.Â