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One Brief Cool Shot, Then Back to a Spring Look

Jan 25, 2012; 11:10 AM ET

Wednesday, 11:35 a.m.

I finally caved in yesterday morning and made an appointment with the doctor to figure out what was ailing me. The good news is that I had no fluid in my lungs, and there was no diagnosis of pneumonia. It appears that this head/chest cold or bronchitis or whatever, that started in my case as laryngitis, is a virus that is hanging on for an average of 10 days. I asked why so long, and her response was it is a smarter virus this year. Just my luck. I won't even go into the rest of the visit, which was, in a word, interesting. If you're one of my facebook connections, you already know what I'm talking about.

I'm feeling a tad better right now, even better than the first couple of hours of the day. There's hope of actually sleeping and breathing in the coming days, and maybe feeling good again! I might even be able to take advantage of some decent weather this weekend to get out and ride for the first time in over a week. We'll see.

At least the weather in the past week has been less than stellar. There were four cold days Thursday through Sunday, it snowed Thursday night and again late Friday night and Saturday morning, so road conditions were awful (though I did see a couple of people out riding their road bikes after the snow Saturday afternoon). Then it rained. And it's about to rain again.

That rain is stemming from a storm developing in Texas that has looked very much like a spring storm, not a winter storm. I'm not seeing any snow with it, just a ton of rain and some severe weather. Austin was clobbered with over 5 inches of rain, and Dallas was soaked with over 3 inches. As I type this, that line of intense thunderstorms is moving in on Houston, and severe weather is a threat for not only the rest of today from there into Louisiana, but also through the night and into tomorrow across parts of the Gulf Coast states, including southern Mississippi and southern Alabama into the Florida Panhandle.

Now if you're going to see severe weather in late January, it most often is near the Gulf Coast, where you have easier access to warm, humid air as any storms go by. Today and tonight into tomorrow are no exception to that general rule. But usually in January a storm of this potency would have snow somewhere around it, either as it pushes cold air out of the way, or on its northwest flank. Through tomorrow, there will be little of either. Even tomorrow night into Friday morning, most of what snow will fall with this storm will be relegated to areas of extreme upstate New York and northern New England.

Behind the storm, it won't get cold real fast. Instead, with a west wind blowing, it will get relatively mild in a lot of places, especially east of the Appalachians. Even on Saturday it should be fairly mild in these places, certainly by January standards. However, two disturbances will change that this weekend. The first will cut across the Midwest Friday with some snow coming out of the Dakotas into parts of Minnesota and Iowa, then through Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Friday night, that snow may impact parts of Michigan, and there may be some snow showers across upstate New York on Saturday.

This will bring colder air into the pattern, but it will be a second upper-level disturbance following quietly on the heels of the first that will buckle the heights more substantially and pull a piece of arctic air from Alaska and through central Canada into the pattern. That means a cold finish to the weekend, and a cold start to next week as high pressure slides into the Carolinas Sunday night and Monday morning.

With the high sliding across the Carolinas, though, and the heights quickly rebounding in the wake of the troughs, the cold will be retreating Monday afternoon across the Midwest and Ohio and Tennessee valleys, and then from much of the rest of the East on Tuesday. That leaves us with an anomaly forecast looking like this on Tuesday:

That doesn't look very cold anywhere in the country, and it won't be. In fact, when you look at the lack of blocking downstream in the Atlantic, it becomes hard to envision much cold in the pattern later next week into next weekend. And even though I do see evidence of an upper-level trough moving into the East as we head into next weekend, it would look like the source region of the air mass draining into this trough isn't likely to be very cold at all. There certainly won't be much snow in the country between now and then, so our rather balmy pattern looks likely to continue into early February.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com