Tracking a Thursday warm front: 40s and Maple sap weather return

Milder air returns

Mild breezes return to Minnesota today. Even the snow covered lands of northern Minnesota catch a break today as highs soar into the 40s.

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Southwest winds blow in the metro again , 40s return for the Twin Cities metro area before a weekend cool off.

Image: Weatherspark

The snow free areas of western Minnesota will soar well into the 50s today to near 60 degrees. Spring has really taken hold in the Plains to the south and west. It's another day of 60s and even 70s in the snow free zones of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas. Warmer weather is so close -- once we lose the snow cover.

Image: NOAA

Pancake Effect

My good neighbor Howie Bennis is always looking ahead this time of year. In a sure local sign of (early) spring, Howie tapped the local maple trees and strategically placed his maple sap collector buckets this week.

Howie is the local tree tapper and sap cooker who takes advantage of Deephaven's majestic maples to produce the sweet amber nectar of spring. Howie and Wendy Bennis and many of our neighbors spend spring Saturdays boiling the sap into sweet syrup.

The finished 'Deephaven Sugarbush' pure maple syrup is among the best I've ever slathered over a stack of buttermilk pancakes. And no, I don't get a cut from anything they sell in their relatively small local operation. For me it's just a (sweet) local sign of the process that we call spring in Minnesota, and a good weather angle. How many meteorologists write about their local neighborhood maple syrup conglomerate?

Days above 40 degrees and nights below freezing? That's the perfect recipe for ramping up the sweet syrup trickle into a gusher. Soon the buckets will fill up, and neighbors will spend another Saturday at the Sugar Shack talking, watching and tasting as the final product flows from the tap.

Why am I suddenly craving a huge stack of pancakes?

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Below average snow in March?

Not literally snow free of course. It would be the equivalent of meteorological malpractice to declare we'll escape any major snow storms the rest of March in Minnesota. march storms have a way of popping up on the weather maps with little advance notice. But the weather pattern right now looks downright inhospitable for major March snow for the next two weeks.

In fact, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center 30-day precipitation outlook favoring a dry March for Minnesota and the Upper Midwest is looking good at this point.

Instead it looks like we could see several more days int he 40s, punctuated by cool fronts that drive temps back into the 20s and 30s for a day or two. The warmest day in sight looks like next Tuesday when temps could again make a run at 50 degrees in the metro. And the forecast looks mostly dry -- meaning we'll probably melt a lot more snow than we get the next two weeks.

There are some signs a storm may brew toward the end of March, but it's way too early to be even remotely credible on that.

As we say in the weather biz, stay tuned.