Arctic air about to go on a hiatus

No major storms for much of Canada through this weekend.

Significant pattern change taking place this weekend will force a major retreat of Arctic air out of eastern North America and the result will be a significant warmup through early next week. Temperatures will drop once again during the middle of next week, but nothing out of the ordinary followed by another warmup for the weekend of Jan. 27/28.

Other highlights........

--Colorado low will track up into the Great Lakes by early next week. The result will likely be a narrow band of heavy snowfall, which may impact the region in Ontario from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie Sunday night through Monday.

--Farther south/east, there may be a period of freezing rain or sleet across portions of southern/eastern Ontario Sunday night into Monday morning, which may cause some travel delays for the Monday morning commute.

--By Tuesday, the storm spreads into Quebec with the potential for some mixed precipitation in Montreal and snow near Quebec City.

--The core of the Arctic air will be over Siberia through Jan. 28, then some of that may bleed into Northwest Canada after Jan. 28.

--I do not see any blasts of Arctic air into eastern Canada through the first week of February.

<strong>Clues to the longer range.....</strong>

Below is my latest interpretation of the ECMWF weeklies forecast model output.

<img src="https://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/miscellaneous/2018/590x449_01181535_jan18a.png"/>

<img src="https://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/miscellaneous/2018/590x449_01181535_jan18b.png"/>

<img src="https://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/miscellaneous/2018/590x449_01181537_jan18c.png"/>

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