Another Bonkers Winter Vermont Heat Wave Is Over; They're Getting More Frequent

Sort of back to normal this morning in St. Albans, Vermont.
After record high temperatures in the mid-60s o
Christmas Day, this Boxing Day morning greeted us
with a thin dusting of snow.

Well, that was weird. 

It's not common to feel comfortable outdoors on Christmas in Vermont wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but that's what we got yesterday.

Temperatures soared to 65 degrees in Burlington, Vermont during the morning, and managed to stay in the upper 50s into early evening. 

That 65 degree reading was of course a record high for the date, besting the previous record of 62 degrees in 1964. 

As noted yesterday, Burlington was the warmest major weather station in the continental United States at 8 a.m. yesterday, when it was 64 degrees.

As expected, there was a lot of flooding from the record warmth, rain and snow melt in southern and central Vermont, but it wasn't as bad as the worst fears.

Early this morning, the Otter Creek at Center Rutland was reached 9.6 feet, which is borderline minor/moderate flood stage. It's falling well short of the forecast 13.4 feet, which would have been a major flood, with damaging consequences. 

Elsewhere in southern Vermont, there were some closed roads, minor washouts and flooded basements, but this didn't turn out to be quite as bad as earlier forecasts, which is great news.

Rainfall was a little lighter than forecast. Most areas in southern Vermont had one to 1.5 inches of rain. A lot, but it could have been worse. 

By the way, early indications are a  similar storm to the one we had over Christmas might hit on the New Year's Eve/Day holiday. 

The forecast could easily and dramatically change between now and the end of this upcoming week,  but right now that next holiday storm could bring another blizzard to the Upper Midwest and strong winds, possibly heavy rain and warm temperatures to the East Coast, and that would include Vermont.  

I don't think the New Year's storm will be as warm as Christmas, but still. It's that kind of winter. 

MORE WEIRD WINTER WARMTH

There have always been the occasional weird, springlike day in the winter in Vermont. It was 64 degrees in Burlington in January, 1906, for instance.

But since the early 1980s, these weird spells seem to have gotten more and more frequent as time goes on. 

It started with a week long stretch in February, 1981, when temperatures were in the upper 50s to low 60s each day.

January, 1990 was the second warmest on record. 

Next, in January, 1995, the temperature rose to 66 degrees in Burlington to be the warmest January day on record. Incredibly, the low temperature that day was 58 degrees, which is pretty close to normal for late June. 

The very next year, in January, 1996 it got just as hot. Unfortunately, that heat wave hit when there was a lot of snow and ice on the ground, and it was accompanied by heavy rain. 

The result was a tragic, severe flood across the Northeast, including Vermont. Those flood killed 38 people, two of them in Vermont. 

The pace of the winter heat waves picked up even more in the past five years or so.

On Christmas Eve, 2015, the temperature soared to 68 degrees in Burlington, setting a new record for the entire month of December.  This was even more extreme when you consider most warm records are set in early December. It was 70 degrees on December 24, 2015 in Rutland. 

On February 25, 2017, Burlington soared to an incredible 72 degrees, shattering the record of 63 degrees set a few days earlier. Before that, the warmest February reading on record was 62 degrees in that hot February of 1981.

The very next February, 2018, it got up to 69 degrees in Burlington which would have blasted away the February record if not for the year before. It got up to 70 degrees in Montpelier in the 2018 warm spell, shattering that city's February record.

Now we have this year's Christmas heat. 

It can and does still get brutally cold in Vermont's winters of course. Just look at the frigid month of February, 2015, or the record early subzero cold in November, 2019 for examples. We will almost certainly experience plenty of subzero cold in January and February. 

However, in large part due to climate change, it seems we are more prone than ever before to springtime in winter in the Green Mountain State.