The forecast for Saturday is windy, rainy and warmer with high temperatures flirting with the 50-degree mark, the National Weather Service said Friday, but once a cold front blows through late Saturday afternoon, the showers end. Much colder air will arrive early Sunday morning.

The front will bring with it highs in the 20s and lows in the teens through next Wednesday.

Meteorologist Allen Randall of the weather service office in Wilmington said it’s all due to a storm system that is moving through the region.

“In the world of weather we see a lot of flip flops like this,” he said. “As this system moves in overnight and into Saturday, we’ll see moisture overspread the area in the form of a wintry mix before changing into all-rain by Saturday morning.”

He said for those who like what he called “classic winter conditions,” the latter part of the weekend and the first half of the upcoming week will be as close to that as the region will get as the forecast calls for mild temperatures to return.

“It looks like this little cold snap early next week will be short lived,” he said, with temperatures predicted to rebound back into the upper 40s to low 50s for the last weekend of the month.

The Weather Channel’s 10-day forecast calls for milder temperatures going into next weekend, with highs in the low- to mid-50s and a 50/50 chance of rain both Friday and Saturday.

As previously reported, The Farmer’s Almanac has described this winter as being on a “polar coaster,” with up and down variations in both temperatures and conditions, and their predictions for the remainder of the month of January show a return to the classic winter pattern that Randall described.

The publication predicted blustery winds through Sunday with fair weather giving way to increasingly cloudy skies and a return to very cold temperatures through the middle of next week.

Frigid cold air will plunge south from Canada next weekend, the almanac predicted, with fair and bitter cold conditions forecasted through the end of the month.

The almanac predicts that February will be cold through mid-month with the likelihood of snow around Valentine’s Day.

However, The Farmer’s Almanac weather predictions were made two years ago, and the NWS forecast only projects into a seven-day window.

“Right now, it’s challenging enough to forecast the weather out for one week,” Randall said. “Beyond that, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Reach Tim Colliver at 937-402-2571