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Potentially record October cold for NC this week

 

An incredibly cold period for October is about to commence. While the nature of this cold period is different then how I envisioned it last week, when I though it would be more of a cold and dry week, what will be most impressive is the London-esque feel to the weather with clouds, showers, and very cool temperatures in place essentially from tonight through this weekend. The culprit is a classical cold air damming set up as a cold high pressure which has brought the considerable cold and snowy weather to the Rockies and parts of the plains slides east into the Great Lakes and wedges cold, dense low level cold air down the east side of the mountains as a very active southern branch of the jet stream brings in clouds and moisture. The result will be temperatures falling during the day tomorrow into the 40s as rain develops. In fact we may not get above 50 again till Saturday afternoon in the Raleigh area and actually for much of the state. So the theme for most of the state is going to cloudy, occasional rain, and very cold weather for October after today.

 

In doing some research for Raleigh, the lowest high temperature for Raleigh ever for October was 45 achieved on October 23^rd 1923 and October 30^th and 31^st 1923. We have a shot at this on Thursday and Friday and this would come earlier than these previous occasions. So as you can see this is a very impressive cold shot for this part of the country.

 

As far as the rain goes I think the heaviest rain tonight through tomorrow night will be over the mountains, southern and eastern NC. This is because often times a system that spawns re-development off the NC coast produces a relative precip minimum over the central sections of NC.

 

It looks like temps will warm up next week as we finally see the cold air get pushed out a bit. Indications from the longer range ensemble models show that we could see a colder pattern for the southeast re-develop by the end of the month.