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| Ice covered trees in St. Albans, Vermont a couple years ago after some freezing rain. A wide ranging storm is expected to bring at least some ice from Missouri to New England over the next few days. |
Here in Vermont, we'll have our share of icky weather, but at this point, it doesn't look like anything extreme. More on that in a bit.
One storm yesterday coated much of the Midwest with snow and some ice, and is now heading into Canada.
An even stronger storm, the one that the other day dumped a good dousing of rain and crackled the skies over southern California with lightning, is now reorganizing over southern Texas.
This storm promises a boatload of widespread bad weather, including the risk of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes along the Gulf Coast and Southeast, flooding from eastern Texas and across the Arkansas Ozarks, and a wide, huge area of ice from central Texas, through a huge section of the Midwest and eventually on into the Northeast.
Western Texas, and an area just to the north and west of that big ice area I talked about, is in for a pretty big snowstorm.
There will be pockets of the ice that will be severe enough to damage tress and power lines. especially in parts of Missouri, and possibly later in a few spots in Pennsylvania. However, most of the ice-related problems will involve hazardous roads.
Since this ice will involve a huge chunk of the nation, expect many car crashes and such over the New Year's weekend. Especially since drunk driving is still a thing on this holiday. Due to the pandemic, a lot of people will stay home on New Year's Eve, limiting the number of people on the roads. Of course, it would have been better if we had no pandemic, but we're stuck.
After this storm, the train of storms crossing the nation will continue, but it's too soon to offer details, paths and types of weather they'll bring as we head into January.
One thing is a little more clear, and that is, at least as January starts, there won't be any severe or long-lasting Arctic outbreaks like there often is this time of year. Most of the frigid air is being bottled up by the current weather pattern way up in northern Canada.
Eventually this Arctic air will probably plunge southward into the United States, but not anytime soon. It's been a pretty mild winter for the nation so far.
VERMONT IMPACTS
The storm that hit the upper Midwest yesterday is up in Canada now, and will drag a cold front through Vermont tonight.
There's not a lot of moisture with it, so we're not going to get a lot of weather. Ahead of the front, it will get windy today. Especially in the Champlain Valley, where some gusts will top 40 mph.
Tonight will bring some snow with the front, probably kind of on the slushy side in the valleys as temperatures warm up before the cold front gets here.
Expect just a dusting to an inch in the valleys, with perhaps a bit more than that in the mountains and Northeast Kingdom. No biggie.
There's no real cold air behind this "cold" front, so New Year's Eve and New Years Day will be quiet and mild. (Highs in the low to mid 30s, lows in the upper teens and 20s).
The storm I talked about above will not get here until Friday night. With not much cold air around, it looks like precipitation will be a mixed bag.
It's hard to say at this point what proportion of the storm will feature snow, or freezing rain and sleet, or plain rain. Suffice it to say roads will probably get slick amid some mixed precipitation late Friday into Saturday.
I'm sure the National Weather Service in South Burlington and other local meteorologists will be fine tuning this complicated forecast as we get closer to the actual storm.
Another storm looks like it will form just off the East Coast Monday. At this point, it looks like it will go far enough east to miss Vermont, but we might as well watch it anyway.
The year 2020 brought us a lot of unexpected things. Why should 2021 be any different?
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