(Radio Iowa) – We are starting to slowly move out of the subzero temperature pattern the state has been in the last several days. National Weather Service Meteorologist Brooke Hagenhoff says temperatures across much of Iowa are already on the positive side.

“We’ll be in the low single digits this afternoon, here for Tuesday. So that will be warmer than we’ve seen the past few days,” she says. “Of course, at this point, everything’s relative based on how cold it has been.” She says they’ve we’ve transitioned the wind chill warning to a wind chill advisory that will last through Wednesday morning. Then we’ll have a small heat wave hit the state.

“We’ve got highs in the low 20s across a good portion of Iowa. So there’s our warm up. Unfortunately, that Wednesday warm up will be a little short lived. We’re going to be back into the freezer for Friday and Saturday highs in the single digits,” Hagenhoff says. The single digits will only last a couple of days.
“Sunday we’ve got highs in the 20s and by Monday and Tuesday we’ve got mid 30s across most of Iowa, so that’s whenever the real warm up starts to take place,” Hagenhoff says.

She says the warmer temperatures will help melt some of the snow that was part of the reason for the extremely cold temperatures. “It does a really good job of keeping us cold. Part of that is because it’s really reflective and so you get the sunshine on it and reflects that heat right back out. And so we don’t get as warm,” Hagenhoff says. “So we’ll have to overcome that a little bit here. Which is a reason that we tend to stay so cold once you get a snow pack like that. But the good news is it does still look like by early next week we should start to eat away at that snow pack.” She says we tend to get a these Arctic outbreaks a couple times each winter.