Cold Weather to relax toward normal to end January

Good Wednesday afternoon to everyone,

The first three weeks of 2025 has been dominated by a cold weather pattern for a large portion of the United States including here in North Carolina. The coldest of the weather is here as we speak but the good news is that we look to be on the way to relaxing this cold start.

Looking at today alone, you can see a lot of unique things. First off, the temperatures and how the cold has taken over the entire nation with the exception of Texas and California. Notice that ribbon of cold air that is lingering along the Gulf Coast? That is a result of the historic snowfall that fell yesterday from Southeast Texas over to the Florida Panhandle and then last night the snow stretched into the Eastern Carolinas.

Visible satellite this afternoon paints the locations that received winter precipitation yesterday. Some of that got as close as the I-85 corridor where 1/2 to 1 inch of snow fell in Upstate SC and the North Carolina Piedmont.

This entire month of January has allowed snow cover to encompass a large portion of North America. Looking at the map below, the blue shading is where snow or ice was covering the ground as of late yesterday, this image does not include snow that fell roughly along the I-75 and I-95 corridor from Georgia to the Coastal Carolinas.

How cold has it been?

The active storm track and snow pack has allowed repeated cold shots to move into North Carolina without a ton of moderation. For several of the COOP sites within our nine-county coverage area, the numbers this month have been impressive.

The current arctic blast has been the coldest so far with temperatures that have been at or below freezing since Sunday evening for our entire coverage area. That string of sub-freezing air looks to end at some point on Thursday as we will begin to see a change to the jet stream across North America.

By this weekend and into next week, the deep trough that has planted the very cold air will lift to where the worst of the cold centers itself toward New England. With a cutoff low over California and Four Corners, the heights will rise some across the South Carolina allowing some moderated Pacific air to flow in on West-Southwest winds.

This will by no-means result in a blowtorch pattern during this forecast period but it will get us back to around normal for late January.

Below is a look at the temperature guidance for Morganton (left) and Shelby (right) showing what we could see over the next week-plus. The average high along I-40 in late January is about 48-49 degrees with about 50-51 degrees for the average high along US 74 from Forest City over to Kings Mountain.

As we navigate through the next 1-2 weeks, the forecast team will have to be on the lookout for any additional winter weather events that could arise based on the timing of shortwaves within the mean jet stream pattern. Given we are in the heart of winter, it would not take a huge deviation for something to materialize. But good news, for right now there are no threats lurking. The idea of seasonal daytime temperatures and cold nights with low humidity will be good for the ski industry in the Southern Appalachian Region.