You don’t need me to tell you that it has been an awfully chilly week. Is this spurred by a rough Valentine’s Day weekend? Probably not, but I can say that as we get away from that holiday, temperatures are rebounding in a fairly significant way.

After successive rounds of low pressure rotated through the US east of the Rockies, high pressure is building in, and it is going to try to stick for a little while. The upper level pattern isn’t terribly conducive to warm weather, but the time of year and amount of sunlight we are seeing, as well as a west wind off the Rockies, with a little bit of southerly flow through the Mississippi Valley is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s already started.

The above image from the WPC shows how much warmer it is already for parts of the Plains and lower great Lakes as compared to yesterday. And it will continue to get warmer further east today and into the weekend.

With high pressure in place, the jet is going to split over the weekend, with a ridge developing in a northerly jet, and a trough continuing to remain in place over the south central US. This will allow the warm up to remain in place, even as rain starts to move in to some of the Plains and western Gulf states. Then, it’s March.

We aren’t expecting any significantly abnormal temperatures in either direction to begin the month, but a normal day in March feels a heck of a lot better than a below normal day in February.