Some parts of the country will experience a few cold days, but it will soon feel like spring or summer almost everywhere.
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Now that April is here, we can all stop talking about arctic air, right?
Not so fast.
A strong cold front originating from the Canadian Arctic is expected to sweep across much of the central and eastern United States on Easter Sunday, April 5, temporarily ending the recent warm spell. The front will bring cooler weather to the East, but those who prefer warmer weather can be pleased to know that the cool weather should be relatively short-lived.
In fact, the U.S. is forecast to remain warm “from coast to coast” from April 9th to 15th.
Overall, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center said in a forecast released March 31 that it expects April temperatures to be above average across much of the United States.
In Texas, for example, the National Weather Service said, “The likelihood of a warmer-than-average month continuing into April is increasing.”
Weather forecast for early April
In the East, April should continue the recent typical spring trend of alternating warm and cool weather, similar to but less extreme than what we saw in March. But the overall forecast is for a warm month for much of the country.
First, a warm Easter Sunday morning awaits the East Coast before a cold front moves through and brings a band of heavy rain and thunderstorms from the Appalachians to the Atlantic Coast. NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center said in an online forecast that this front will bring generally slightly below average temperatures to some parts of the central and eastern United States through the first half of the week ending April 5.
For example, in Pittsburgh, highs will be in the 80s on Sunday, April 5th, followed by highs in the 50s.
The front will be followed by a wide area of high pressure. Forecasters say this is definitely a “cold” high, not a “warm” high.
“The anticyclone’s origin is in the northern Pacific Ocean and southern Canada, so it is very different from the ‘homegrown anticyclone’ that recently formed a heat dome in the West for two weeks,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Alex Sosnowski explained in an email to USA TODAY.
The forecast says it will get warmer and cooler again.
High prices will then settle in the southeastern states. The week of April 5 should start off cool, but then gradually change with April sunshine, Sosnowski said. “Over the course of many days, we should see record levels of warmth, but it should be nowhere near as far in scope and scale as in the West,” he added.
Overall, Sosnowski predicts a mostly cool start to the week followed by gradually warming temperatures.
“Temperatures in the Interior Southeast, Mid-Atlantic Coast, and Mexico’s Gulf Coast states will likely be well above historical averages for 12 of the first 15 days of April,” Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather’s chief long-range meteorologist, said in an online forecast.
Cold sea breezes could bring temperatures down some days along parts of the southern Atlantic coast, he said.
“The warm wedge would be the result of an atmospheric traffic jam that develops from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Coast,” Pastelok explained. “Then a major storm could develop over central and eastern Canada around the 15th of this month, pushing in colder air.”
It’s getting warmer in the west too.
Temperatures in the West are expected to be 10 to 20 degrees warmer than normal at the beginning of the week thanks to a ridge of high pressure, the weather forecast center said. “Above-normal temperatures will spread over the plateau region by Tuesday (April 7) and gradually spread eastward on Wednesday (April 8) and Thursday (April 9) as the ridge moves eastward,” the center said.
The continued warmth is even worse news for the rain-poor West, where snowfall is well below normal and in some places limited to the highest elevations, the Weather Prediction Center (WPC) added.
“The gradual melting of winter snow during spring and summer is a key component of Western countries’ water resources,” WPC said. “This winter, lower-than-normal snowfall is putting additional stress on alternative water supplies such as reservoirs and groundwater sources.”
Doyle Rice is a national correspondent for USA TODAY, specializing in weather and climate.
