SARANAC LAKE — With only two days breaking above the freezing mark this month at the Adirondack Regional Airport — and reaching no higher than 36 degrees Fahrenheit– January has so far gone down as a classic Adirondack winter’s month, so far.

Current forecasts suggest that the month is on track to finish as such, with seasonable temperatures expected today and Wednesday, and below-normal temperatures for Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

Despite sunshine and high temperatures topping out in the upper 20s today, strong winds with gusts as high as 45 mph will keep wind chill values — a more realistic gauge of how people perceive conditions to feel — in the single digits for much of the day, according to the National Weather Service’s Burlington, Vermont office, which serves the Tri-Lakes area.

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Early Tuesday troubles

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An arctic cold front is expected to cross the region overnight, setting up a cold Tuesday, with highs only expected to reach the low teens. A squall line is expected to form with the cold front’s passage. It is forecasted to move through the Tri-Lakes area from northwest to southeast sometime between midnight and 7 a.m. Tuesday.

A squall refers to an organized line of precipitation that quickly sweeps through an area. While generally short in duration — often moving through an area in less than 30 minutes — they pack a punch, with heavy snow combining with strong winds to create a period of reduced visibility, often under half of a mile.

Rebecca Duell, a meteorologist with NWS Burlington, explained that while snow squalls don’t leave much in the way of accumulation in their wake, they pose a danger for motorists, with the rapid movement of the squall line causing conditions to shift from calm to whiteout in a short amount of time.

“It’s really not a threat if you’re at home,” she said. “It’s only really a threat when you’re on the road because the conditions become very difficult very quickly.”

Even though overall snow totals are nothing remarkable for the area — with the early Tuesday squall line expected to only drop between 1 and 4 inches across the area — Duell explained their danger lies not with the overall accumulation, but during that short period of reduced visibility on the roads.

“That’s the thing about snow squalls,” she said. “They usually don’t drop very much snow, it’s more just the intensity in there of a very brief duration.”

With its timing being so important, Duell said the office’s current prediction — as of Sunday afternoon — is for the squalls to move through the area around daybreak and ahead of the bulk of the morning commute. However, she cautioned that their predicted passage time could shift later, resulting in a greater impact.

“It could be closer to midnight with less impact to the morning commute, or if it shifts a little bit later, then it would potentially impact the Tuesday morning commute,” she said.

To stay up to date on the latest timing with the Tuesday morning snow squalls, visit weather.gov/btv/.

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Mid and late-week

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Temperatures will be on a bit of a roller coaster ride to round out January, with highs once again recovering to the mid-20s Wednesday before plunging to their lowest values of the week overnight into Thursday morning.

Unlike Monday, the winds aren’t predicted to be as strong, making Wednesday feel like the warmest day of the work week. A clipper system is expected to slide through the Tri-Lakes on Wednesday, bringing a round of widespread, but generally light snow. Accumulations look to range between 2 and 4 inches. The clipper system is expected to usher in the coldest air of the week, with Thursday and Friday morning lows expected to be in the single digits below zero, with highs on Thursday above zero, but struggling to make it out of the single digits in that direction.

Early signs suggest that temperatures will recover once again to near seasonal averages for the first weekend of February.