Many are looking at the next winter storm that will hit the continental United States now that Winter Storm Cora has passed over the weekend. Several areas in the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and the southern US received up to a foot of snow, with a mixture of ice and sleet. Fortunately, it looks like the weather will be generally clear for most of the week, though a major shift in the jet stream will set up conditions for several potential winter storms in the middle of January 2025. Here’s the upcoming winter storm snow forecast this week.
Is there going to be another winter storm after Cora?
Current models predict that the southern United States may once again be hit with a winter storm around Saturday, January 18, according to several sources.
Weather reports on Monday, January 13, from experts Ryan Hall and Max Schuster (aka Max Velocity on YouTube) show that an arctic jet stream from Canada will begin blasting the central United States with extremely low temperatures by the weekend. While ensemble models project that most of the US will experience above-average temperatures on Thursday and Friday, a sudden rush of cold air will begin to cover the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and New England.
This weather pattern mimics the same conditions that brought Winter Storm Cora. If moisture from the Gulf of Mexico hits this jet stream, it has the chance of becoming yet another major winter storm. The severity of these systems is still tough to predict until we get closer to the weekend, but Schuster says that there could be one or two winter storms that form. These two storms would be called Demi and Enzo by The Weather Channel.
As noted by Hall, there is a slight risk, 20 to 40 percent, that the central and northeastern US will be hit with heavy snow some time between January 18 and January 24, according to predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
While the West Coast will mostly be spared by any winter storms this week, dangerous fire conditions will continue from Monday to Wednesday as Santa Ana winds threaten to make the Los Angeles wildfires worse. On Monday morning, the NOAA released a Red Flag Warning for Los Angeles and Ventura counties to be in effect from Tuesday at 4 AM PT to Wednesday at noon.
