"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:t9QEd.1024$OF5.332@attbi_s52...
Usually winter is my favorite time of year to fly. The air is cold and
crisp, the visibility is CAVU, and the landscape has its own stark beauty.

Not this year.


You can blame that cold outbreak down the west coast with the unusual snows
in coastal British Columbia and rains down the west coast through
California. That set up the major front and storm track in a more-or-less
straight line from southern California through Maine. Little weak pulses
are running along that front and keep triggering more precipitation.

And the warm air aloft is creating a huge inversion, trapping the low level
moisture forever. North Platte, 0000Z last evening, had a temperature of
plus 10 Celsius at 5000 feet ASL more or less, and minus 6 at the surface.
And they are what, 2700 feet?? So that's like 15 degrees inversion in 2500
feet?? Serious trap for low-level moisture, the dispersion of which is very
difficult to forecast accurately, until there is a major circulation change.

http://twister.sbs.ohio-state.edu/up.../skewt/lbf.gif (link
evaporates-updates with time)

I expect Iowa would have been similar.

So now the computers expect the next pulse to be a major low, that will
finally draw the cold air down over the entire interior of the continent and
change the storm track completely. By the weekend, things should be back to
the more-or-less normal condition of mild west coast, pushing mild air
inland over the mountains, cold interior all the way down to Texas and the
Gulf, and the storm track up the east coast.

It remains to be seen whether that will persist for a while.

IMHO.