Northern Vermont Snow Cover Finally Established, Only A Little More Coming

The joys of working from home: It's 24 hours after 
yesterday's storm ended and no need to dig out the trucks
yet at my St Albans, Vermont home. I'll
get this shoveling done today, though. 

 By one literal measure, winter got off to a really late start in northern Vermont. 

Up here, we can usually count on a winter's snow cover being established within the first couple of weeks in December, if not sooner. 

This year, the ground remained mostly bare until yesterday.  Sure, we had some light snows, but they melted quickly. 

Yesterday's snow measured up to a decent, if not overwhelming depth. It also looks like it will finally stay around for awhile. There might even be a few minor additions to that snow cover in the coming days. 

Snow accumulations hewed very close to predictions made before the storm. From roughly Route 2 north, there was generally four to seven inches of snow.  The winners in this storm were Walden and Northfield, each of which got 8.5 inches of snow. 

The further south you went from Route 2, the more sleet and freezing rain mixed in. As forecast, snow and ice accumulation ended up being in the one to four inch range.  

Up in Burlington, there was six inches of new snow, as they were also a little north of where sleet mixed in. It was only a moderate sized storm, but still Burlington's biggest dump of snow since last February 7. 

Snowfall for the season in northern Vermont is still lagging well behind normal for this point in the winter.  Burlington's seasonal snowfall stands at 7.6 inches below normal as of yesterday. 

At least there's snow on the ground, and it will stay.  Over the upcoming week, it will remain relatively mild for January, especially at night.  But it will stay cold enough to keep the snow cover. 

The nation looks like it will have a stormy pattern through January, but at least in the short term those storms will mostly miss us in Vermont. 

A new nor'easter is forming this morning near the North Carolina coast, but it will go too far to the south and east of us to give Vermont much of anything.  Some upper level support north and west of the storm could give us a inch or less of snow tonight. 

The weather pattern is blocked up over the Atlantic Ocean, meaning there will be a traffic jam of sorts of weather systems east of us. That nor'easter will probably end up stalling south of Nova Scotia through midweek because of this traffic jam. 

This storm might even start to move westward toward Maine a bit midweek. That could throw a little Atlantic moisture our way, which would set much of Vermont, especially north and east of Interstate 89, with a little light snow toward Wednesday. 

Beyond that, there are indications of attempts at nor'easters perhaps next weekend and beyond, but it's way too soon to know whether those storms will come close enough to have any effect on us.