This cold night?

It’s late winter verging on spring, so that means random swings in the weather as the climate system tries to roll over and balance the changing amount of energy received by the sun. In one sense the weather and climate system is really simple: the sun heats up the air over the equator, and that warm air rises, cools and moves north, allowing the cold air over the surface at the poles to move south, heat up and rise, in a never ending cycle. But the earth also rotates every day, the orbit is elliptical, and it’s tilted, and the surface is covered by land and water and mountains and vegetation all kinds of other crap, and pretty soon that simple attempt to maintain the energy balance a complicated mess of moving air masses and ocean currents.

This next five days (19–24 Feb) is a classic example of what happens this time of year as air masses do battle over North America. Let’s look at the big picture tomorrow (Friday) afternoon at 1pm:

You can clearly see that the wind (green barbs) is bringing warm moist air from the Gulf of Whatever up over the southeast. There is a giant low pressure system (the lopsided bulls-eye pattern centered over the Missuri/Iowa border), with cold air (blues and purples) to the north trying to wrap around. Now lets jump forward 24 hours to Saturday at the same time:

You can see the flow is shifting from the south-to-north flow to more directly east-west ahead of the approaching air mass. Saturday it is likely to get stormy as the air masses are now colliding. Notice the big low is off of Maine, but as we look at Sunday something is brewing in the South:

As often happens in these situations, another low pressure center forms along the front and moves rapidly northeast (a classic nor’easter). Since in the norther hemisphere air circulates counter-clockwise around low pressure, that is dragging cold air southward. By Monday things look like this:

The low that started over the South is now a powerful nor’easter off the New England coast:

… where it will be dragging much colder air further into the deep South, which is the main concern. Oh, yeah, it will be dumping a bunch of high winds, waves, and snow on the blue bellies …

What does it mean for the Frogmore Metroplex (Coastal GA/SC Lowcountry)? Well, it means that until Saturday it’s going to be warm – maybe hitting the 80s on Saturday. That also means as the cold air hits the warm air, thunderstorms are possible. Sunday will clear, then Monday and Tuesday will be 30 degrees colder than Friday. We’re unfortunately in a delicate situation right now as many plants have budded out and some are blooming. A freeze is likely to cause some damage. It looks like temps will just go below freezing in downtown Savannah Monday night, with Sunday and Tuesday nights coming close. Frogmore itself looks to just hit 32F, but inland away from the water such as the Statesboro wasteland looks to be in the 20s. Ridgeland and Hinesville look to hit the upper 20’s as well.

Ground temperatures have started warming up, here in midtown Savannah 6″ below the surface it’s at 62F, so we’re not looking at much if any pipe freezing risk. This is mainly a “protect plants that have started to flower” kind of episode, certainly Monday night. Sunday night might be smart as well in case the forecast is off – will update on that as we get closer.

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I’ve used this one before but it’s a pretty song so here it is again …

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