The north-eastern US is about to get a cold spring farewell from winter’s bad boy, the polar vortex, which could bring rare May snowfall and record-low temperatures to some areas over the Mother’s Day weekend, forecasters say.
Usually the polar vortex is a batch of cold air that stays trapped in the Arctic all winter, but a couple times during the season, it wanders south and brings bone-chilling cold and snow to Canada and parts of the United States.
Around this time of year, the polar vortex usually breaks up, but this breakup is a bit different, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside Boston.
“The polar vortex didn’t do much the whole winter, but on the way out I guess it kind of sent a message: Just because I didn’t do much this winter, don’t think I can’t,” Cohen said Thursday.
A low pressure system off the coast of southern New England is pulling cold air down from the north, Alan Dunham, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norton, Massachusetts, said Thursday.
Forecasts called for perhaps as much as 2in of snow in the Berkshire mountains in western Massachusetts on Friday into Saturday; an inch or so on grassy areas of central Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and western Connecticut; and rain with a few flakes possible in the Boston area, he said.
Upstate New York could even see an inch of snow, according to Hunter Tubbs at the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine.
Temperatures may plummet to record lows. The 9 May record low in Boston is 35F, also in 1977. Freeze warnings are in place for parts of Pennsylvania, Tubbs said, with freeze watches stretching into New Jersey and as far south as Maryland.
Winter-like weather is bad news for Massachusetts golf courses, which were allowed to reopen Thursday after being forced closed by the state because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Everything is against us, absolutely,” said Therese Barry, one of the owners at the Bungay Brook Club in Bellingham.
“We’re a weather-driven business,” she continued. “But to have this happen the minute we are open is quite unbelievable.”
The unusual goodbye is splitting the United States. It will be unseasonably cold from the Great Lakes east and record warm from the Rockies west, Cohen said.
