Woe The People Who Need To Clean Up After Nor'easter

Satellite view of the nor'easter off the Northeast coast
Saturday. 

 The big nor'easter that hit much of New England is rapidly departing, leaving people a really difficult cleanup job.  

That's because it most places where a lot of snow fell, that snow was very, very sloppy and wet. 

When snow has a high water content, like this snow did, it creates lots of problems with downed trees and power lines. And it creates an unenviable job of shoveling it away.  It's like shoveling wet cement. 

One stat illustrates how much water is in this snow in many areas. One town in Massachusetts had three inches of snow.  In a standard issue snowstorm, that would roughly be the equivalent of 0.3 inches of rain. But Saturday's three inches in this Massachusetts town was the equivalent of 1.16 inches. 

Snow amounts were about as predicted, or a little less than predicted in Massachusetts.  There just wasn't much cold air available to the storm, so what snow fell came while temperatures were at or a little above freezing in most places.  

There were exceptions. A high elevation in Paxton, in central Massachusetts had 12.5 inches. 

Up in New Hampshire and Maine, totals in many spots were more impressive. Rangely, in western Maine, had 13.5 inches. Gorham, New Hampshire saw 15 inches. 

The snow was especially problematic in Maine.  Widespread power failures hit this past Monday as high winds hit that state. Then, just as the number of people in Maine still without power finally dwindled, this wet snowstorm hit. 

NECN reports at least 220,000 people in Maine without power due to the wet snow. The heavy weight of the snow reportedly also collapsed two barns in Maine. 

Here in Vermont, this was, as expected, no big deal.  There were many reports of two or three inches of snow up and down the Connecticut River Valley and in the Northeast Kingdom. Western Vermont mostly had flurries or nothing at all. 

While not much of the storm's precipitation reached into Vermont, the nor'easter's thick overcast did. Between that, a low sun angle and low level moisture creating low clouds and fog, Saturday was a quite a dark day in Vermont. It was almost as if the sun never came up.  That's a drawback of living in an otherwise beautiful state.  It can be remarkably dreary in the Green Mountain State in November and December. 

This was a very challenging storm to forecast, and those forecasts still ended up being pretty accurate, so I'm impressed.

This whole week in Vermont will be quiet.  There will be a lot of clouds around, which is typical for December.  More dark days. Um, yay? 

Chilly weather, but nothing odd for December, will continue through Tuesday, then readings will rise again to somewhat above normal for the second end of the week. 

We'll have very little precipitation this entire week, which is a bit odd for what is normally a stormy time of year.