February 16, 2018

Cooling Off

Current Conditions

Temperature: 10 degrees, feels like 2 degrees
Dew Point: -2 degrees
Winds: S 7 mph
Pressure: 1022.3 mb
Visibility: 10 miles

Today was uneventful like the rest of the week. Temperatures were definitely cooler this morning at 1 degree feeling like -9. Winds were out of the west at 8 mph and the sky was clear.  By noon the temperature peaked at 5 degrees and winds were the same as this morning. The high today was 15 degrees, quite a bit cooler than the high of 33 yesterday. The pressure has also gone up, an indicator that a high pressure air mass is sitting over Wisconsin again.

The rest of the United States is also uneventful as high pressure fronts are dominating from coast to coast. Figure 1 shows the locations of the high pressure fronts.

Figure 1. Current surface map for the United States.

My prediction from yesterday was correct: high pressure fronts moved in from Canada and the temperature dropped.

For tomorrow, I predict that temperatures will warm up again because the winds are coming out of the south, and southerly winds bring warmer weather to Wisconsin in the winter. There could also be a chance for precipitation because there is a stream of water vapor going from west to east from the Pacific Ocean (figure 2).

Figure 2. Line of water vapor going from the Pacific Ocean and moving eastward. The water vapor stream shows up dark on the map.