Warmer temps headed to Western Pa. this week, forecasters say

It doesn’t fit the exact description of a January thaw, but it certainly will feel just as good as one. That’s what experts at the National Weather Service office in Moon are predicting for the Pittsburgh area this week: much-warmer-than-usual weather.

Temperatures will hover around the 50-degree mark for much of the week with highs soaring into the 60s on Wednesday.

“We’ve actually seen this pattern most of January,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Rich Redmond. “After that real cold snap that we saw in late December around Christmas and New Year’s, we had a pattern change across the United States. The colder air was being funneled into the western United States, and, because of that, we were on the warm side of the pattern.

“Our flow is coming out of the south/southwest while the West Coast air is coming down from Alaska and Canada,” he said. “The warm air will be pushed northward over us while the colder air is now into the Rockies and those areas.”

According to the Farmers’ Almanac, annual temperatures traditionally show a slight increase around the middle of the month, and a subsequent dip during the final week of January.

But Redmond is hesitant to officially call this a January thaw.

“The (term) January thaw actually came from many, many, many years ago,” he said. “When we would be in a very cold pattern in January and there would be snow on the ground, the rivers would be icy, the creeks would be frozen and we would sometimes see a change in the pattern where we would see a warm up that would start melting the snow and the ice and so forth.

“This really doesn’t have anything to do with that because we just haven’t been cold this January at all.”

Redmond said the region can expect pleasant weather for most of the rest of this week.

“We’ll have a little cool down probably by Friday. And then as we head into the weekend, we should see a brief warm up Saturday and into parts of Sunday.”

Then it’s back into the deep freeze, Redmond said.

“Most of the country is actually going to cool down because the colder air that’s been kind of stuck out west is going to spread across most of the country. It looks like it will start to happen sometime after Jan. 25.”

Redmond said it won’t be anything like what the area experienced in December, but it will be cold.

“Come the last week of January and into early February, we’re going to start to see our air come more from northwestern Canada and Alaska. We’re going to get back to more normal January temperatures — highs in the 30s and lows in the teens and 20s.”

In other words, enjoy the unofficial January thaw while it lasts.