February Outlook: Will we stay warm and dry?

We’re nearly a week into February and so far, we’ve seen warm and sunny weather - but what are we expecting for the rest of the month?

Let’s start with temperatures:

This is the time of year when we would typically expect to see some of our coldest temperatures - instead, we’re staying well above average.

The warmup doesn’t stop here, temperatures continue to rise through the end of the week. Michiana and the Great Lakes region in general is still under the influence of a ridge of high pressure in the upper levels of our atmosphere, giving us a steady flow of warm air. ‘

Our calm pattern shifts by the end of the week as a trough of lower pressure moves in Thursday night, bringing rain and cooler air with it. We’re cooling down into the weekend with highs falling back into the 40’s. Even with the cool down this weekend, we’re still staying unseasonably warm, with highs above normal into next week.

Moving on to precipitation:

February has had a beautiful start with plenty of sunshine in our skies, but the heavy cloud cover that we know all too well here in Michiana won’t stay away forever.

We haven’t seen any precipitation for the month yet, and we’re likely to stay on the dry side through the end of February. South Bend has a 46% chance to see drier than normal conditions. This means that by the end of the month, we are more likely than not to have seen less than 2.04” of accumulation overall, the average for the month.

When we look at mean precipitation accumulations for each month of the year, February comes out as the driest month on average, and it looks like we’ll be living up to that title this year.