Over 10 inches of snow and wind chills in the 20s were recorded at the summits of the Big Island in Hawaii on Monday. Wyoming, by contrast, received next to nothing.
“That Hawaii storm is pretty cool,” said Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day. “There were parts of Hawaii that were under Winter Storm Warnings, but Wyoming wasn’t.”
It’s been an unseasonably warm, dry winter for most of Wyoming up to this point, while the extreme opposite has been true elsewhere. That’s all about to change, according to Day.
After several weeks of a jet stream logjam, Wyoming’s weather is in the process of rebooting. With that logjam now cleared, Wyoming’s weather is beginning to shift.
The transition will take some time, but signs point to a steady move toward colder, snowier conditions. By mid-January, the winter we’ve been waiting for could finally arrive.
“It's like hitting ‘Control-Alt-Delete’ with a Windows computer,” he said. “It has to go through the shutdown, reboot, and start everything up again. You don’t get immediate gratification, and that’s what we’re going through with this weather pattern change.”
New Year, New Pattern
December’s weather was dominated by a stubborn high-pressure ridge that hovered over the Aleutian Islands in the northern Pacific for several weeks.
Day described it as a “logjam” that blocked Arctic air from descending into the Rocky Mountains and funneled it elsewhere, leading to record-breaking cold temperatures and a deluge of snow in the eastern U.S.
Until that block broke, Wyoming wasn’t going to get a lot of winter weather. Thankfully, that’s what’s happened.
“The super-strong high-pressure ridge that wouldn't go away is gone,” Day said. “We're still going to have some of the remnants of it over the next couple of days, but a pretty strong cold front coming through Thursday and Friday is the first signal that the block is going away and will initiate some changes.”
Those changes will be evident in places that have been yearning for winter this season. Day said the incoming cold front will be carrying enough moisture to cover eastern Wyoming with snow.
“Sheridan, Gillette, and Casper are going to get a little snow on Thursday and Friday,” he said. “Sundance and the Black Hills will be especially favored. Laramie and Cheyenne will get a little bit. It’s pretty wimpy as a winter storm, but it’s more than we’ve seen in weeks.”
By the weekend, daytime highs will be in the high 30s to low 40s. That’s slightly warmer than average, something Day said will probably persist going into next week.
“Over the weekend and probably through Wednesday, we're going to hit a four to five day stretches where it’s not going to be really warm, but it's not going to be really cold either,” he said. “To go back to the analogy, this is when the computer will fully boot up, and you’ll be able to put in your password by Thursday or Friday.”
Ridge Rigidity
The uncertainty in the short-term forecast is a temporary high-pressure ridge that’s going to give Day and other meteorologists “a lot of sleepless nights.” The question isn’t when, it’s where.
“If the ridge retrogrades, goes off the coast of California, and builds up into Alaska, that is a cold signal that allows the very cold Canadian air to head south,” he said. “We start to get colder, and winter finally gets going.”
The alternative is that the high-pressure ridge retrogrades and stalls off the California coast. In that scenario, it will act like the December logjam, funneling the cold Canadian air past Wyoming and into the Dakotas and the Great Lakes region.
That scenario would be a repeat of what happened in December, which would be far from ideal. It’s too early to say, but Day said the current trajectory looks favorable for Wyoming.
“A lot of our forecast tools suggest that the ridge is going to go retrograde, build and gain strength over the Gulf of Alaska, and allow the jet stream to start making further advances out of Canada and into the western United States,” he said. “Where that ridge sets up is going to dictate how the rest of January goes for Wyoming.”
Rubber Hits The Road
Even in the worst-case scenario, where another block sets up in mid-January that blocks more winter weather from reaching Wyoming, it’s not the end of the road. Day will be “on pins and needles” watching what happens, but he’s not giving up the game yet.
“To use a sports analogy, it's not even halftime yet,” he said. “There's a lot of winter potential left for the season. This ridge could mean a very unsettled, much colder second half of January, or it could direct all that weather east of us.”
Meanwhile, the snowpacks in western Wyoming are still doing very well. The warm Pacific air that’s kept most of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah so dry has been a windfall of snow in the mountains of western Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.
Day said this is where “rubber hits the road” when it comes to Wyoming’s winter weather. Even the short-range forecast is looking more promising than it did in December.
“There will definitely be more winter, especially east of the Continental Divide, on Thursday and Friday than we’ve seen up to this point,” he said. “We’re still nearly 10 days out from this ridge developing, so we have some time to figure things out.”
The important thing is that Wyoming has effectively “Control-Alt-Deleted” its December dryness. There’s uncertainty in the forecast, but everything’s looking cooler going forward.
“We need things to shift and get a lot happening here,” he said. “But to get a lot happening here, we've got to go through this process. You do not get immediate weather gratification, but in terms of the weather pattern rebooting itself, we’re entering a new period that's going to be different than what we’ve been through over the last six weeks.”
“We need things to shift and get a lot happening here,” he said. “But to get a lot happening here, we've got to go through this process. You do not get immediate weather gratification, but in terms of the weather pattern rebooting itself, we’re entering a new period that's going to be different than what we’ve been through over the last six weeks.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
