In today's Forecast Feed, Geoffery Cornish breaks down the weather ahead in the Northeast and the rain and snow threat in California.

Cold conditions remain entrenched across the Northeast and Great Lakes, following a December marked by below-average temperatures in those regions. A persistent pattern of low pressure and a Greenland block has maintained the cold, with repeated snow events, including over two feet in Syracuse earlier in the week.

Looking ahead, a shift in the weather pattern will bring a flatter, west-to-east flow, allowing milder Pacific air to move across much of the country and pushing Arctic air back into Canada. The most significant weather is forecast for California, where an atmospheric river event will deliver heavy rain and substantial mountain snow to the Sierra, with snow levels dropping and some areas expected to receive more than four feet of snow through the following week.

Cold to hold in Northeast, snow possible in Sierra

Here on the forecast feed, we want to jump into the new year. 2026 is upon us. We've got the cold in the northeast and across the Great Lakes, but will we see any more significant snow? There's a pattern change on the way that's going to reorient the storm track. Some of the snow is going to be shifting into the Sierra for the short term. We'll look at the big picture, some influences at play. But before we totally move forward, I want to take a quick look back at December, which was a cold month across the Great Lakes, the Midwest, the Ohio Valley, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. We've had below average temperatures, below the historical average here across that region and above average temperatures across most of the West. At least that's the way most of December has panned out. And one of the drivers here has been a persistent lobe of strong low pressure aloft upstairs over parts of eastern Ontario, western Quebec at times over the eastern U.S. Big trough. And there's been an extension of the polar vortex at times, so again, a lobe of the coldest air of the hemisphere that's become kind of detached from the Arctic and kind of wavered south at times, offering some of the coldest of the cold over eastern Canada. And we've been impacted by that in a peripheral way here in the eastern U.S. as well. Now, I want to take a look at the computer models here to show you how we got here and where we're going. And overall, there has been what we call a Greenland block, so we're going to look all the way up into Greenland, Canada or Greenland east of Canada, I should say. And as we highlight this area of high pressure, a ridge over Greenland and over the far North Atlantic, that's been a pretty persistent feature on the map here in the past week or so, and it's still with us now. And that has allowed and caused an area of low pressure to kind of waver south and just be a pretty persistent feature on the map over eastern Canada. And there's some cold air associated with that. If we begin to draw some steering influences, again, if there weren't this blocking pattern off the east coast of North America, the flow wouldn't be like this. It would be more like this, west to east, storms would be moving offshore. That's not the case. So the steering flow around these low pressure and high pressure systems has been very serpentine like this. And if we think about where we are here in the Midwest, the Ohio Valley, that means northwest flow. So we've seen a series of clippers scoot on down the pike. It's been one after the next. Again, these clippers riding along the flow there, one after the next here, they're coming on down the pike. And each of these has been followed by a reinvigorated flow from the northwest at the surface. That leads to more lake effect snow. We've had over two feet of snow early this week just in Syracuse alone. Now where are we going? As you notice, that big ridge over parts of Greenland, it gets a little disrupted. It's still kind of there into Sunday. We're still dealing with this blocking pattern where low pressure is just stuck over eastern Canada. But over time into next week, we're going to begin to see some changes here. And eventually the positioning of that high pressure system is kind of lost. It moves away from its position in Greenland and we begin to see a flatter flow breakout. So you can see as we begin, if we look at the amplified pattern for North America here and for the U.S., again, trough off the west coast, big trough in the east, big ridge over the northern plains and the Rockies, that's going to flatten out. Let's go all the way up ahead to maybe Wednesday of next week. Look at this. This is zonal flow. There's a trough in the west, but it really flattens out in the northern branch of the jet stream. It's flatter. That's going to drive some Pacific air across more of the country. When the flow flattens out, we really don't hold on to the Arctic air as much. It withdraws and retreats north to Canada. So we're going to have a few more disturbances. These bright colors here, if we look at the 500 millibar map, this is about 20,000 feet up into the atmosphere, these bright colors, this is a measure of vorticity or spin in the atmosphere. Again, it's a little bit of inside baseball, but if you have those bright colors moving in your direction, you're going to be generally in an area where there's going to be more lift, more cloud production and more snow. You'll notice that there are a couple of disturbances out there. There's one in the southern branch of the jet stream, but it stays pretty far removed from that in the northern branch of the jet stream, so there's not going to be much interaction between the two. And then things kind of flatten out, and then we get into that period of west to east flow across the plains in the eastern U.S., not as many big dips in the jet stream, except for what's going on in California. So that's where we want to draw our attention here to the next storm system and kind of looking at the graphic for not the current storm, not the one that's occurring this New Year's Day. We get a little bit of a break on Friday, but we really escalate again Saturday, Sunday Monday, Tuesday, four days with heavy rain and mountain snow. The snow levels will be coming down, and we're forecasting another one to two inches of rain in southern California, in L.A., two to four inches in Pismo Beach and up into San Francisco. That does not include the rain that's falling now. This is beginning Friday evening through the weekend, and the snow levels are going to come down. So a little bit of snow this New Year's Day. Snow levels drop to 7,000 feet Thursday night, so Donner Pass sees a little snow tonight, a little break for Friday, and then feet of snow resume in the mountain passes this weekend into next week. So I want to look at that with a little more clarity. Again, in the east, not a whole lot of high-impact weather here, aside from the cold, occasional snow showers near the Great Lakes, a couple of systems coming through. But California, that's where the action is, persistent rain, mountain snow out there. And if we look at the precipitable water, this is the vertically integrated, I don't want to use science-y words, but the moisture from the ocean surface or the ground, all the way up to the top of the troposphere where the weather happens to live. If you get all that moisture, squeeze it out, this is how much there would be. And what you'll notice is an atmospheric river event, this string of moisture, this streamer of moisture coming into California for most of the weekend and into next week as well. Snow levels, the elevation at which you go from rain to snow if you're climbing into the mountains, initially they're pretty high, around 9,000 or 10,000 feet. They're going to be dropping to about 7,000 or 8,000 feet tonight, but then into next week they drop even lower, 6,000 or 7,000 feet. That's going to put the mountain passes into the snow zone, so I just wanted to close with a quick look at some big numbers. When you get into the greens on this color scale, you're looking at more than 4 feet of snow in some parts of the Sierra through next week. And that is your forecast feed. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

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