January Gloom Rolls On

Thick overcast and a dense freezing fog Tuesday 
morning in St. Albans, Vermont.

January often brings blasts of frigid air to Vermont, as we all know.  

Those subzero cold waves are annoying, but also very dry, so at least you usually get a couple bright, sunny days out of them. A little sun brightens the mood, right?

When Arctic air is lacking, like it is this year, the price you pay is gloom. And we're certainly getting that! 

The last time we got any appreciable sun was back on December 19.  Since then, we've had glimpses of sun, but we've been stuck under a dull overcast. That state of affairs is going to continue, I'm afraid. 

With little change in the weather pattern coming, a temperature inversion is holding strong. That means there's a layer of somewhat warmer air above us.  That's trapping moisture below that air, so we're stuck in the low clouds, and occasional fog, flurries and even a little patchy freezing drizzle. 

There will be virtually no snow accumulation this week in most place. Though I did manage to pick up 0.8 inches of new snow up here in St. Albans, early Wednesday morning. 

The freezing fog we've had out there is starting to create some rime ice on some of the trees. The freezing fog consists of super cooled water droplets that freeze on contact with surfaces. (That's why it might be a little slick underfoot).

The rime ice is light and feathery, so it won't weigh down trees or power lines or anything like that. If the sun were to come out, the rime ice on trees glows gorgeously in the light.  It's beautiful. Get your cameras ready, just in case.

It might be a long wait for any real sun, however. There was a surprise break in the clouds that I could see to my west in the Champlain Valley just after dawn this morning, but now that's filling in with clouds. 

I suppose drier air will try to make a run at us occasionally from high pressure in Quebec between now and the weekend, but it seems that brighter air has odds stacked against it.  Some sun might break through, but it won't amount to much. 

It's not just us, Much of the eastern Great Lakes, northern New York and New England and southeastern Canada have been stuck under the grey skies for days or weeks now. 

If you want sun, try the tippy tops of mountains in the Adirondacks, or the summit of some taller Vermont mountain like Mount Mansfield. The overcast is so low that occasionally, the mountain peaks poke through the cloud deck, leaving those summits to bask in the sunshine. 

This constant gloom is keeping temperatures incredibly steady. Usually, Vermont is famous for wild temperature swings in January, sometimes from below zero to well above freezing and back below zero in just a few days.

A classic example is three years ago, when the temperature in Burlington went from minus 20 on January 7 to 61 above just five days later on January 12 an 81-degree switch!  

On one average day this time of year, the temperature will change by 17 degrees. In the entire first six days of this January, the temperature only shifted 13 degrees, bouncing between 23 and 36 degrees - that's it.

I'm sure we'll break out of this rut eventually. 

However, I remember saying back in early November, when we had a very strange, beautiful long spell of sunny skies and near record warm temperatures that "good weather in Vermont does not go unpunished."

For sun lovers, January, 2021 is payback for that November spell of weather.