An infrequent winter visitor is coming to Detroit on Tuesday: above-freezing temperatures.
The Feb. 10 forecast calls for a high temperature of 40 degrees, the first time the area has made it above the freezing mark in 18 days. The last day the area saw above-freezing temperatures — at all, at any point — was Jan. 21, when the high temperature made it up to 33 degrees.
January and February have been dominated by a stubbornly stable pattern with an upper atmosphere ridge in the western U.S. bringing the jet stream — and frigid air from the Canadian Arctic — almost tunneling out of the northwest to the Great Lakes region, said Steven Freitag, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in White Lake.
From Jan. 15 through Feb. 9, the daily high temperature was on average 11.8 degrees below what’s normal for this time of year. Though the area hasn’t reached any record-cold temperatures, the persistently cold weather has meant snow cover has stuck around. Detroit has 25 straight days and counting of snow cover of 4 inches or more, putting it in the top 10 in that category in the history of National Weather Service records, which began tracking snow in 1880 and daily snow depth back to 1958. The record for consecutive days of 4 inches or more of snow in Detroit was 57 straight days from January into March 2014.
But it’s about to start feeling like more of a normal winter, Freitag said.
“Now things are going to be reversing where it’s a little more of that atmospheric troughing out west,” he said. “That will allow for more of our normal or above-normal (temperatures) for the month.”
Systems will still move through bringing bursts of colder Canadian air, he said. But those systems should be shorter in duration, and there will also be more periods where warmer air from the southern U.S. makes it into the region.
Temperatures should stay “right around 32 plus or minus two degrees” for Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 11 and 12, with temperatures rising again to the upper 30s by the weekend.
Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit set to see above-freezing temperatures for first time in weeks
Reporting by Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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