Mild weather: Long-lasting, or a temporary reprieve?

After a month of the coldest December weather in many years, the Carolinas finally are getting a break as we head into the New Years holiday.

A weak low pressure system is crossing the area today, bringing clouds and a few sprinkles, but skies will clear later Thursday night and usher in a very nice New Years Eve. Fans heading to Friday's Meineke Car Care Bowl at Bank of America Stadium will have sunshine, temperatures in the upper 50s, and -- judging from the tepid ticket sales -- plenty of room to spread out.

Nice weather will continue through New Years Eve, and relatively mild conditions are expected to continue through next week.

That raises the question: Is this the long-awaited breakdown of the pattern that brought us cold, sleet and snow in December? Will our La Nina winter -- mild and dry -- finally get under way?

Or is this just a temporary reprieve?

Based on what long-range forecasters are saying, it's the latter. The cold and stormy weather is returning, they say.

The Greenland block -- a strong high pressure system that brings cold and storms into the eastern United States and into Europe -- is making a comeback. The consensus seems to be a wintry pattern will return around Jan. 10, and the eastern United States will face another extended period of nasty conditions.

So whatever happened to La Nina?

I asked two experts, and they agree ... the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO) have been far too strong for La Nina. The pattern of the jet stream, sending cold air and storms on a roller-coaster ride southward from the Arctic into the U.S. and Europe, has cut off the predicted west-to-east pattern of milder conditions that we'd expected.

It shows, once again, that long-range predictions are tricky. When we're told to expect an El Nino (cold and chilly) or La Nina (mild and dry) winter, those Pacific Ocean conditions are only part of the story. The NAO and AO have a big role in what happens, along with some other factors.

To be fair, some of the long-range winter forecasts (I'll give Accu-Weather's Joe Bastardi credit for this) said there'd be occasional episodes of arctic blasts intruding on La Nina. But December was a lot more than an "episode." It was nearly the whole month.

So if all this is true, we'll get about 10 to 12 days of seasonal weather here in the Carolinas before we head back into the deep freeze.

One cautionary note ... forecasters are only 1 for 2 on recent predictions of cold weather. They were 100 percent correct about December, but some meteorologists had called for a cold weather outbreak in late October. That didn't happen.

However, with solar energy very low now, a return to cold weather doesn't seem too far-fetched.