(WSYR) – It may be December, but it doesn’t feel like it in most of the country. While Alaska has been dealing with cold and snow and Hawaii braced for “catastrophic rainfall,” pretty much the entire contiguous United States has been spared any significant winter weather.
A new projection from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that’s probably not going to change anytime soon.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center released its two-week weather outlook Monday. The temperature map below shows a high probability of above-normal temperatures for pretty much everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains.
The highest chance of above-average temperatures (shown in the darkest shade of red on the map below) falls around the Ohio River Valley. Only the West Coast of the contiguous U.S. is projected to see colder-than-average temperatures.
Then there’s Alaska, where the weather has been downright frigid. The average temperature in Fairbanks for November ended up more than 3 degrees below normal. December isn’t doing much better, with the average temperature through the first 5 days of the month at -14.5 F.
Looking ahead to the next couple of weeks, no significant change is expected in the weather.
For the rest of us, a few bouts of cold and snow are possible in the next two weeks, especially across the northern sections of the United States. However, there doesn’t appear to be any true mechanism to deliver a prolonged stretch of cold and snow heading toward the Christmas holiday. That’s good news for travelers, but not so much for winter sports enthusiasts.
