January 2016 beginning to look like LITERAL polar opposite of December 2015

UPDATE: A correction was made regarding dates of the upcoming potential winter storm. Originally I wrote, "Sunday, January 6th" as I was looking at the wrong month on the calendar. That week's Sunday is the 3rd, and January 6th falls on a Wednesday. The corrected dates are clarified below.

For all intents and purposes, December was a late fall month (or perhaps even early spring month) weather-wise. We enjoyed temperatures in the 60s, lots of rainfall, had bouts of lightning and even severe weather. Nights that had low temperatures below freezing were few and far between, let alone days, and record highs were blown off the board for weeks in a row all over the state. Despite our November snow, until yesterday, it's been very easy to forget that it's winter in Michigan.

That will not be the case in January, at least if the GFS's long range forecast isn't complete bunk.

Two things should be very apparent by the above loop. The first is that it's likely to get cold - very cold compared to what we've been dealing with. For the first week of January, daytime highs are going to struggle to get above freezing, and we may be looking at lows in the teens or even single digits. This will probably bring a great deal of lake effect snow to the snowbelts, as the north winds cascade across some ridiculously warm lakes. I would not be surprised if several feet of lake effect snow is in the future of the western counties of the lower peninsula - not to mention most of the upper peninsula - within the next week.

The second, more interesting thing is that there looks to be a couple of opportunities for some powerful winter storms to come up from the south. The first chance for a storm appears to be the week of Sunday, January 3rd, on or around the 6th or 7th. For now, the GFS is forecasting that a surface low over Manitoba will deepen and intensify as it sucks up moisture from the gulf, which could bring just about any type of precipitation to our neighborhood, as our temperatures will be questionable around that time. If I had to venture a guess at this point, I'd say snow, though it's way too early to tell for sure, let alone tell how much would fall, if the storm even manifests. The second opportunity (and this may well depend on how the first scenario pans out) would come a couple days later, around the 9th or 10th. This run predicts a stronger system that would strike us directly, though keep in mind that this is near the point where the GFS starts to become highly unreliable in terms of forecasting precipitation.

To summarize:

• It's likely that temperatures will begin to drop toward normal levels for January in Michigan - perhaps even slightly below normal in some areas - beginning this week.
• High amounts of accumulating lake effect snow are likely to fall in the snowbelts
• There should be at least one opportunity for a decent winter storm to strike Michigan by the end of the week of January 3rd