Big Storm Gives Us A Very Warm Squirt After Toasty November

This morning, December 1 in my St. Albans, Vermont yard.
Grass is still and the perennial beds look ready to burst
into spring growth.  It was a very warm November and
December is off to a toasty start.

The large storm that gave us here in Vermont some decent rains and some destructive winds elsewhere has helped us kick off a remarkably toasty start to December. 

Early morning temperatures today were in the low 60s in parts of Vermont, which would have been a bit above average for that hour in July. 

Eastern Vermont was the warmest.  Island Pond, usually a notorious cold spot in the Northeast Kingdom was at 61 degrees early this morning. Morrisville was 62 degrees and Montpelier was 60.

Further afield, Caribou, at the northern tip of Maine, was at 57 degrees, just one degree shy of the all time warmest day for December up there. If it makes it to that record, it would be the second month in a row with the all time hottest temperature. It reached 75 degrees up there in early November. 

Even so, this does not portend a record hot day for most of us.  Temperatures will actually slowly fall here in Vermont during the rest of the day, though still stay quite warm by December standards. 

This follows a very warm November, both locally and nationally.  Virtually all of the continental United States was warmer than average in November. Many cities east of the Mississippi River had either their warmest November or at least scored in the top five warmest. 

Here in Vermont, November averaged out to 43.3 degrees in Burlington, enough to tie the record with 2011 as the third warmest November.  Unless December turns out to be remarkably cold - unlikely according to current forecasts - this will be one of the warmest years on record here in Vermont.

Elsewhere in Vermont temperatures ran two to four degrees above average in general.

Rainfall was near normal in eastern Vermont and below normal west of the Green Mountains. It's good that eastern Vermont bore the brunt of what precipitation we got in November. They were the drier part of the state.  In fact, there's still some lingering drought east of the Greens, but that's diminishing. 

Yesterday's storm also got eastern areas wetter than the west. Go further into New Hampshire, Maine and southern New England, you had a worse storm, as expected. Those areas had widespread power outages and local flash floods. 

Vermont got brushed by those high winds. As of early this morning, nearly 2,000 homes and businesses were without power in Orange County, near the New Hampshire border, according to Vermont Outage Map.

Further south, tornado watches were up as far north as New Jersey, and it appears at least one tornado touched down in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Back here in Vermont, the trend will be toward gradually cooler weather, with slightly above normal  temperatures Wednesday through Saturday, with near normal temperatures from Sunday well into next week at least.

Near normal in early December is certainly cold enough for snow, so winter sports tu

The weather will be active, with several chances of rain and snow, then snow through next week.  It's still hard to tease out whether any of these rainy and/or snowy spells will amount to anything substantial. 

It still looks like more springtime in Vermont, the kind of conditions we had this morning, will have to wait until, well, spring.