The title says it all, and if you’ve lived in the Ohio Valley as long as I have, you know exactly what I mean. We’re about to ride one heck of a “temperature roller coaster” over the next week and beyond, so make sure you are securely fastened inside the vehicle and as always, no personal photography devices are permitted. 
Getting beyond the terribly cliched description of a temperature swing, let’s dive straight into things.
We start the week with an area of low pressure developing to our west. This system will slide NE through Indiana during the day today, which places the entire tri-state in the warm sector. Expect rain, heavy at times, to persist through the morning before winding down by midday. You may even hear a few rumbles of thunder as well. The rain will become much lighter by afternoon as the cold front swings through the area. Temperatures will be quite warm for the first part of the day, and should top out in the lower 50s area-wide. The front will pass through during the mid afternoon hours, with falling temperatures and gusty winds expected in its wake. I included some flurry or snow shower action in the forecast as any leftover moisture will fall as snow later Tuesday night and into Wednesday. They won’t be widespread, but when combined with falling temperatures, may lead to some slick spots Tuesday night through Wednesday morning.
Other than a few passing flurries, Wednesday looks quiet and cold with highs barely making it to the freezing mark.
Our next system arrives on Thursday. It’s a clipper and won’t have a ton of moisture to work with, but the strong temperature gradient it will be riding should allow for the development of snow showers through the day. As of now the models don’t look overly impressive, and actually keep the bulk of the accumulations to the north of the immediate tri-state. As is the case with all clipper systems, they tend to be quite tricky to forecast. As it stands now, the models crank out up to an inch of accumulation, but I’ll keep an eye on things and will notify you of any forecast changes. Expect highs in the upper 20s on Thursday.
The Friday-Saturday time frame also presents some forecast challenges as we’ll have a system to our west/southwest sliding east/northeast. One model (the GFS) keeps temperatures below freezing the entire time with snow changing to freezing rain. The rest of the models have begun to track the low further north, allowing for any frozen precipitation to change to plain rain. I’m not overly confident in the forecast at this point, and thus went with a wintry mix changing to rain. If the GFS were to verify, we’d be looking at an inch or so of snow changing to around 0.20-0.25″ of freezing rain. That model solution would lead to a multitude of travel problems across the area, so I’ll keep watching to see if it joins the “wintry mix to rain” party or the others switch around.
Looking into the long-range, the roller coaster ride of temperatures will continue with brief surges of warmth followed by blasts of bitter Arctic air. In a sense, the “battle of the air masses” is setting up shop overhead, which always leads to tricky forecasting. From my years of studying weather patterns, one thing is for sure. In this kind of a setup, expect to see it all; heavy rain (and even strong thunderstorms), warm air surges, Arctic cold blasts, and wintry precipitation.
You may be hearing that “winter is over” or something along those lines, but nothing could be further from the truth. We have just over six weeks left of meteorological winter (which ends March 1st), and nearly ten weeks left of calender-based winter. We have made it this far without any SIGNIFICANT wintry precipitation, but don’t bank on that to mean that we’ll go the rest of the winter without any. I went with 25-35″ total snowfall for this season, and while that will likely be too much in the end, I still think we’ll do some catching up over the remainder of the winter.
Stay tuned for more on the Thu and Fri/Sat systems, and enjoy the roller coaster ride of temperatures! You can find my latest seven day outlook posted on the appropriate page above.
Take care, and have a great Tuesday (despite the rain)!
-Trevor Cole, WOUB-TV Forecaster
CincyForecast.com
Facebook.com/TrevorColeWeather
Twitter.com/TrevorColeWx
AbsoluteVorticity.com
