Rest of December to feel more like September in Western Pa.

It’s beginning to look a lot like…spring?

Maybe the alternative rock group Counting Crows should change the name of their hit song to “A Warm December.”

Temperatures are expected to reach the mid 60s by Saturday and after a slight cool down to the mid 40s on Sunday, we’ll be looking at temperatures in the 50s and 60s for most of next week. So, how can this be happening with less than two weeks to go before Christmas?

“The overall weather pattern has kept the cold air bottled up into Canada and the Arctic,” said meteorologist Rich Redmond of the National Weather Service office in Moon. “So, anything that comes through, there’s nothing to keep it in place. So, we get a quick couple of days of cold weather and then we start to warm back up again.”

The reason, according to Redmond, is that the cold air that’s been trapped in Canada will break off and move down over the northwestern coast of the United States – Oregon, Washington and northern California.

“In response to that the warm air is going to build again over the central part of the United States and begin to head eastward. We’ll see that actually get stuck here for most of next week,” said Redmond.

So, just how unusual is it to have this kind of weather in December?

“It’s happened before but it doesn’t happen a lot,” he said. “The actual pattern we’ve seen through most of November and into December is quick hitting and we don’t have anything to hold the colder air in the United States. We’re not seeing snow because it’s just not cold enough.”

So much for a white Christmas. And Redmond says don’t expect to see any of the white stuff for the rest of this month.

“I think we’ll have some colder air moving in towards the end of the month but nothing, at this point, that looks extreme,” he said.

So, put away the parkas for now. A sweater will do.