A warm-up moves in for Thursday across all of the state on strong southwest winds and plenty of sunshine. High temperatures will jump back into the sixties and stay that way through Friday in Milwaukee before a cold front moves through late in the day. That cold front shouldn’t touch off any precipitation since the atmosphere is very dry at the moment, so Halloween weather looks pretty good at this time in the Milwaukee area.

In yesterday’s article I gave you the preliminary winter outlook from the National Weather Service, and also had a bit of fun with the wooly bear caterpillar. Earlier this autumn season you may have read about the Farmer’s Almanac which predicted a harsh winter for Wisconsin in 2008-09 with below average temperatures and heavy snowfalls. The almanac states they were right in predicting a long, hard winter for Wisconsin last year with bitter cold and above average snow. They may have been right about the snow, but we did not experience a bitter cold winter.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which was wrong last year, has predicted the next winter will start out a bit cold in December but rebound to average temperatures in January and February. Snowfalls will be below average for much of the winter with average snow in December.