Thanksgiving week travel weather looks quiet so far
Snow chance Sunday, maps look mostly dry Thanksgiving week. Temperature roller coaster ahead.
Go Deeper.
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Thanksgiving week is one of the busiest and most important travel weeks of the year. So far the Thanksgiving week forecast looks fairly drama-free.
Light snow Sunday up north
Ron Trenda did a good job of laying out the weekend forecast, so I’ll look ahead to next week in this post. The only real weather issue next week arrives Sunday with the next cold front. Light snow across northern Minnesota could lay down some minor accumulations up to an inch or so across most of northern Minnesota.
Thanksgiving week starts on cold notes. Our windy inbound air mass Sunday looks like the coldest so far this season by Monday morning. Lows will approach zero up north, with teens in the Twin Cities and southern Minnesota.
Highs Monday will struggle to reach the 30s in the south.
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Tuesday and Wednesday bring milder southerly winds again. Highs will push into the upper 40s across parts of southern Minnesota.
Cold turkey
Right now Thanksgiving Day and weekend look cold, but mostly dry. Highs likely hover in the 20s across most of Minnesota with a few 30s south Thanksgiving Day.
We’ll keep an eye out for changes, but so far I don’t see any significant storms lurking for Minnesota Thanksgiving week. Grateful.
Stay tuned.
A brief blast from the past
I learned a long time ago just how important holiday travel weeks are to Minnesotans.
One of my first jobs in the weather business was to coordinate and staff the WCCO-TV Traveline 4 project back way in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The idea was simple. Let’s provide phone banks for viewers to call in and get personalized travel forecasts during the holidays. The station was surprised at the volume of calls we received. I answered a lot of phone calls and talked with a lot of Minnesotans about holiday travel and other weather questions. We also did live updates during newscasts.
As the call volume increased beyond my capability, we staffed the phone lines with smart, eager meteorology students from St. Cloud State University. It was a great experience for those students and a nice little holiday job. It was also a great experience for me. Talk about a weather focus group. Talk with a thousand Minnesotans about weather, and you learn a lot about what people want to hear.
Fast forward to 2021, and people still want to know the same things about holiday travel. These days everyone basically has a weather supercomputer in their cellphone. But personalized forecasts still have value.
May your holiday week travels be safe and joyous.
