Spring cold snaps to bring hard freezes, snow to Midwest, Northeast
Old Man Winter has something to say about the official start of spring on Thursday and may continue to cause trouble in the weeks ahead for parts of the Midwest, Northeast and even the Southeast.
A storm arriving in the Midwest on March 23 will prove that winter’s not done with the Great Lakes yet.
Spring officially arrived Thursday morning, but winter still has some fight left and will send rounds of cold air and snow across the northern states, from the Plains to the Midwest and Northeast.
At the start of March, AccuWeather's Long-Range Team warned that the polar vortex could reach part of the central and eastern U.S. during late March into April. The movement and weakening of the polar vortex will help to push back warm air in the North Central and Northeast through the first days of spring.
The shift in the polar vortex will force storms to track far enough south to bring temperatures and precipitation similar to late winter. But because it is spring, this will not be like a big, burly blast of subfreezing or subzero Fahrenheit air lasting for days, as would typically happen in the dead of winter.
It will likely result in more days with temperatures near or even below the historical average rather than above from the Midwest to the Northeast in the coming weeks. This will lead to hard freezes in the Midwest and Northeast, so gardeners should not be tempted by the recent retreat of wintry conditions.
AccuWeather meteorologists are tracking a storm that will produce snow and a wintry mix across the Upper Midwest and interior Northeast from this weekend into early next week.
Snow is forecast to largely avoid the major Midwest cities of Chicago and Detroit, as well as the Northeast metro areas of Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City. Some snow or a wintry mix may get close to Minneapolis and Boston for a time.
Accumulating snow is likely from parts of North Dakota to northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, central and northern Michigan, upstate New York and central and northern New England as a storm moves along from Saturday to Monday.
"More wintry systems will follow the storm from Saturday to Monday during late March and into early April," AccuWeather Senior Long-Range Meteorologist Joe Lundberg said. "If those storms edge farther to the south, then some slushy accumulation of snow could get in close to Chicago, Detroit and New York City as well."
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