Little Ice Age Returns? Flash Freeze, Extreme Cold

Due to the upcoming Northeast U.S. storm, I'm short on time today, and won't have time to cover any of these topics in-depth, but there are a number of very important winter weather stories today in the East. Among them...

1. A "flash freeze" is expected for the I-95 corridor and surrounding area Monday morning (we are working on a story on this). This could prove very dangerous when the temperatures behind the cold front fall rapidly and turn wet roads to ice. It may be completely unexpected in areas that saw only rain.

2. The arctic outbreak next week will be historic -- especially for December. We are predicting high temperatures below zero in Minneapolis Sunday, which has only happened once in the last 10 years' worth of Decembers, and only happened once last winter at all! In Chicago, we're predicting a high of 11 Monday, which would be colder than any afternoon last winter. Charlotte, NC will see their normal low (37) swapped for their normal high. Realfeel temperatures will be below -20 in some places Monday morning (map above).

3. There is some talk about comparing the recent cold to the Little Ice Age (1600's-1800s) in the United States and United Kingdom (where the cold may steal Christmas). Since I wrote a blog entry about how Holiday Lore was created during the Little Ice Age, this is of interest to me. Joe Bastardi said yesterday in his European Blog:

We also repeated some of Joe's Bastardi comments in a story giving more information on the U.K. situation.

4. We are working on a new map and story for AccuWeather.com regarding the weekend snowstorm in the East. The models behaved very erratically overnight, however, so this is going to be a last-minute forecast type of storm.