A cold week ahead for Chicago

With today’s cold start and even colder ending next Saturday, high temperatures for the week ahead will average nearly 11° below normal. Actually a brief mid-week “warm-up” into the mid 20s may be the highest readings Chicagoans will see for the next couple weeks as the Siberian Express is expected to kick in full force by next weekend. At that point an upper jet stream flow pattern will be well established, effectively steering arctic air out of northern Russia around the Arctic circle and northern Alaska through central Canada into the north-central United States. Northeastern Illinois will experience predominantly northwesterly winds, which will periodically turn on the lake effect “snow machine” in northern Indiana and southwestern Lower Michigan. Today is a good example, with a lake-effect snow warning in effect for that exact area, where specifically La Porte, Elkhart, and St. Joseph counties expect 6 to 10 inches of snow.
--By Paul Dailey, WGN Weather Center Meteorologist