Forecast: Warmer temperatures are on the way

As Winston Churchill might put it, this week isn't the end of winter, or even the beginning of the end. But Eastern Iowans enjoying what could become a January thaw can hope it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

“We're around the bend,” Chris Legro, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Davenport office, said Sunday night. “The days are getting longer every day.”

More importantly to area residents who've shivered through a frigid couple of weeks, they're getting warmer. A front expected to cross the region this morning will bring one more night of single-digit temperatures before a southerly upper-air flow settles in for the week.

“It's going to be a real quick hitter as far as that's concerned,” Legro said of tonight's brief arctic blast. “It's going to be one night where we get down to single digits, but then it's going to turn around really quickly again and bring in some of that warmer air. By the end of the week we're going to looking at getting above freezing.”

The area isn't likely to gain any snow, either.

“We're looking at flurries at the most, not really accumulating any snow out of that,” Legro said. “With all the snow on the ground, we could see some fog and drizzle, but we're not talking anything real serious.

Thursday's predicted high temperatures - 35 for Cedar Rapids, a degree warmer in Iowa City - would be the warmest for both cities since Christmas Day, when it was 39 in Cedar Rapids and two degrees warmer in Iowa City.

The warm-up comes on what's historically the coldest days of the year. The year's coldest average high temperature for Cedar Rapids, 26 degrees, occurs Jan. 12 through 15, before gaining a degree, although the coldest average low of 9 degrees hangs around until Jan. 22.

And the days are getting longer: Today's 9 hours 22 minutes of daylight is 14 minutes more than that of the Dec. 21 winter solstice.