It is a sad day across the meteorology community. I know there are political undertones to everything, but particularly with the story today that hundreds of National Weather Service employees were laid off today and rumors are that there will be more to follow. I don’t believe it is controversial to say my heart aches for the mostly young men and women who had their dream jobs, and are now unemployed.

The American government is the single largest employer of meteorologists, and all of your favorite weather people have a personal connection with the Service one way or another. The compassion we feel is personal.

A lot has been made of how impersonal and cruel the cuts have been, which naturally makes it hurt more, knowing that friends and respected cohorts were so callously discarded. This has been a tough time for all federal employees and those that love them and appreciate them. The loss of meteorologists at the NWS cuts deeper for all of us, though.

We’ll notice next week as a major severe weather outbreak hits the southeast. We will again notice for subsequent storms this summer. We’ll notice during hurricane season. Private weather companies in America are built on the back of NWS data and systems. All of us will suffer under an understaffed Weather Service.

Other nations don’t have a similar bureau, but other nations don’t have the same kind of virulent, dangerous weather in all forms. In America, the federal Weather Service is a form of public safety that is irreplaceable. Forecast models come from the NWS, unless they come from abroad. Constant worldwide coordination seems like a challenge moving forward, staffing or not.

In a world where a high premium is placed on prediction, we are in uncertain times. Weather forecasting was changed forever today, and not for the better.

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.

It’s been a very snowy day nationwide. A quick moving feature starting from the Northern Plains and raced east where there are still winter weather warnings out.

Much is being reported about multiple rounds of storms afflicting the country this coming week, and this first round is informative. You can’t get a bunch of storms unless they are fairly tame and move at lightning speed.

It was a topsy turvy weather month, with the tragic and catastrophic fires in Los Angeles to the bizarre snow storm in the southeast. The month, and the era are both so out of sorts, it’s good to say that the top forecaster title belonged to the NWS last month.

Outlet	Forecast Wins (year)
National Weather Service	2
Accuweather	1
Clime	1
The Weather Channel
Victoria-Weather
WeatherNation
Weatherbug

This is an image of Bridger Bowl ski area’s parking lot. Bridger Bowl is in Montana, northwest of Bozeman, and thus far, they have reported 6″ of snow today. Many other ski areas in the mountains of Montana are in a similar situation, as a ranging warm front slicing through the Montana Rockies is going to dump over a foot on some of the peaks and valleys of the region.

You know, where it’s supposed to be snowing. Low pressure is arriving from the Oregon Coast, laden with plenty of moisture, and merging with a cold pocket descending from the Canadian Rockies, giving the entire region snow. A reinforcing shot is coming in the next 24 hours, and after a break on Thursday, another shot will come on Friday. It’s really going to stack up in Big Sky Country. Better still, this is also bringing some moisture up and down the California Coast.

While the resorts appreciate the snow, they certainly also want guests to make it there safely. The activity looks like it will let up on Sunday.

The tendency for most people I know is to look deeper and deeper into the future until you can finally find a bit of satisfying news. If you team is having a bad year, look ahead to your prospects, or failing that, the draft. If a city is battling historic wild fires, then keep looking further out until it seems like there are good opportunities to settle some of these blazes.

The current situation regarding fire containment is below, even as the Santa Anas are howling again:

The largest, most destructive fires are increasingly under control, though obviously, and particularly with the Palisades fire, there is quite a ways to go. While loss of property will continue to be a concern, the fire is now over a week old, and those that need to evacuate should be safe, even as the fires may flare again thanks to the winds.

Unfortunately, even after the wind is expected to abate through the day tomorrow, and fire crews will hopefully be able to get the fires reined in even more, the Climate Prediction Center has issued their outlook for next week. Cold weather will continue to be a block in the east, and Santa Anas, along with the dry weather that has unfolded this season, will continue.

Particularly from the dates of January 23rd through the 25th, the CPC specifically calls out a “40-50% chance of below normal precipitation” and a “40-60% chance of hazardous high winds” neither of which are what we want to hear right now. Even if the drought continues, the cold air in the east needs to move out so the winds can die down. That’s when the fires can be put out, and Californians can start to rebuild and recover.

The current windchill is in the 40’s all the way down to north Florida and the Texas Gulf Coast. And those figures are 80 degrees warmer than what Minot, North Dakota is seeing tonight. This chilly intrusion is illustrated by a very strong jet streak in the southeastern US and a trough angled from the Great Lakes to the southwest.

The jet underscores the cold air, and the angle of the trough is keeping the pattern in place. Persistence often leads to problems, as whatever conditions are held in place can wear down infrastructure. The precipitation associated with this storm is off shore, so flooding is not a concern. The growing cold will continue to be a concern for the next couple of days.

The real problem, of course, is that it is holding a dry, windy pattern over southern California. A lot of us in the Midwest are hoping for a warm up. Californians may not know it, but they will too. Recovery may not really start until that big trough clears out and the pattern changes. Right now, that looks like Wednesday. Hang in there.

Fires in the Los Angeles area have made headlines this week, for being the most destructive in the history of the city, for afflicting so many familiar faces, and for sweeping through the area in January, when we should just be reaching the height of the wet season in California.

I don’t discuss climate change much here, because I like to distinctly separate climate from meteorology. To that end, it is important to distinguish that climate change did not cause this tragedy, but rather created an environment in which such a tragedy might occur. The long term effects of climate change are best left to discussion by climatologists, and those knowledgeable of the systems climate change will impact. While climate change did not necessarily cause the fires, as I said, the weather of the last year set the stage for the disaster, and the weather of the last couple of days may have caused the fires, and certainly made them exponentially worse. Don’t take my lack of discussion on the climate as any sort of commentary on anything other than – I am a meteorologist, and I am not an authoritative source on climatology. I can tell you all about the local, short term weather that made these fires what they are.

The first thing that you need to make a fire is the fuel for the fire. After years of drought, last winter was a wet one in California. A thirsty terrain was given a healthy drink of water at the beginning of 2024, and plant life that had been scoured through years of fire and drought came back and was replenished. And then, after the wet winter and early spring, it stopped raining, and it got dry again in southern California.

More recently, high pressure has settled into the southern Rockies behind a strong trough bringing the cold air and snow in the southeastern US. The flow around high pressure is clockwise, and positioned where it is, it will be off shore in southern California, meaning that it is dry. Additionally, because he high pressure was strong, and gravity and temperature changes between the sea and land played a bit of a role, the winds this session were absolutely howling over the Santa Ana Mountains. The wind was strong enough to cause damage on it’s own, including to power lines.

Most wildfires, especially in southern California, are of human origin, either because of the intentional setting of them, or more likely in this case, because of downed power lines, which is why power companies out west are sued so regularly. The downing of these power lines is also a problem, because power lines are near people. With a swelling population, there are more power lines and a greater exposure to a fire. Additionally, fires are now more likely to start near inhabited areas, simply because of the infrastructure covering more territory.

There isn’t any rain in the near future for southern California, however there is some hope in the form of reduced winds. High pressure does look like it will be tapering off early next week. As the fires are currently uncontrolled they will likely get worse before they get better first.

It’s frankly been a runaway since the summer for our top forecaster of 2024. While some outlets had very good months, and we had our wins here and there, The Weather Channel was consistent throughout the year. They had the most individual forecast wins this year, and were the top forecaster based on consistently finishing near the top of the standings, even when they weren’t the best for the day. Congratulations to The Weather Channel, and thank you all for another fun year at The Weather Blog!

Outlet	Forecast Wins (year)
The Weather Channel	17.48
Victoria-Weather	14.81
Accuweather	8.16
WeatherNation	7.83
Weatherbug	5.16
National Weather Service	4.82
Clime	3.5

It was another warm year, with another warm winter already started. We’ve just stepped into 2025, but already, this year feels different. Specifically, it feels cold.

As the year begins, the Northern Plains are experiencing the first tastes of below normal temperatures, but the cold is only going to intensify this week. A few ripples along the jet stream are going to drive the mean jet southward, which will allow for low temperatures to look like this by next Tuesday.

That is below freezing as far south as the Mexican border. There may be frost at Disney World. Areas that typically don’t see air this cold are the ones most impacted by these kinds of readings. The cold is less remarkable because of the magnitude of the temperatures, but rather where they are found.

The broad trough hosting this cold air is going to have a stubborn streak, and will remain in place for a while. I’ve just included the day 6-10 outlook, but every outlook from the Climate Prediction Center paints a similar picture through 1 month!

Welcome to 2025, and more to the point, welcome to January.