February Thaw in the Works

Anyone else have a touch of spring fever after this past weekend?  I know I sure did! 

Typically during the month of January we experience some type of 'winter thaw' but high temperatures during that month struggled to make it much past 36°.  After such a chilly start to February it looks like spring will be making an early apperance, at least in the short-term.  Temperatures Saturday made it to 38° and Sunday we topped off at 44°.  While we might sit just a few degrees cooler this afternoon, the warming trend will continue through the end of this week with high temperatures on Thursday possibly reaching into the low to even mid 50s during the afternoon!  The jetstream, which has been positioned across the south this winter, will finally move northward and this will allow very mild air to spill up into the Plains and much of the Midwest.  Each day the current snow pack will continue to melt away with the only evidence of the February blizzard being the larger snow piles that typically take a couple warm spells to completely melt away.

This is the current snow depth across the U.S. and you can see how the recent snow across the southern Plains and south has pretty much melted away.  This should only help us in reaching the 40s and 50s by the end of this week.  The National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center has pretty cool animations of the past two weeks in regards to snow depth, snow melt, average snowpack temperature and so forth.  To view these animations, just click on the link above and click "Two Weeks".