New Year Might Start off With a BANG

All models show the northern hemisphere entering another heightened period of extreme amplification--that means that the jetstream will buckle quickly--like a whiplash, and when that happens, major events occur. For several runs now the ECMWF or European model has shown a deep eastern trough early next week. The last couple of runs have really got deeper, colder and stormier for the Southeast and much of the East Coast by next week.
There's too much discrepancy on the model runs right now to say where the storm will develop, but for now its worth watching. I will mention the GFS model, which has been showing many cutoffs well in advance this season, doesn't show this one. However it did briefly have a similar event back on  December 22, which made it a run valid at 384 hours..so it could be a lucky strike for it. Either way, despite model indices, such as this being a La Nina, strong +AO and NAO, we still tend to get into a period of strong amplification about every 3 to 4 weeks, and twice these upper lows have dropped a little snow in the Tennessee Valley. Now if the ECMWF model is right, much colder air gets involved, and a potential major deep snowfall would result, but we can't say for sure yet.
One other thing, the ECMWF model also latched on early last year around this time, and caught the Christmas Southeast snowstorm from about a week out...eventually other models joined it.  I'll update how I think this goes when I get a feel for one way or the other, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the models work westward slightly with this cutoff, placing the Southeast in a major rain-to-snow storm, and potential historic deep snow for some areas, especially around the Appalachian Chain and adjoing piedmont. No guarantees on any particular storm though and this one may not work out quite like this, but believe me when I say we're nowhere near done with monster sized storms in the South.

I have been stating a while now that this Winter will be an Historic one in terms of snow depth, for some areas of the Southeast. I still think that, and the tell-tale sign is the fact that the models continue to show all the high amplitude pattern and the resulting "cut off" lows. We've seen several this season and very far south, so it's only a matter of time before someone is digging out of a snowfall they will remember a very long time.

Dec 22nd 18z run of GFS

GGEM (Canadian) Model heading toward Deeply Amplified Pattern for the early part of 2012