This January's Boring Vermont Weather About To Get Slightly Less Boring

If we're lucky, we might get some picturesque wet snow
on Saturday in Vermont. Could easily rain, though. 

The weather here in Vermont has certainly been blah so far this January.  With all the um, exciting, national news, that's probably a good thing.  Thats' one less thing to deal with, right?  

This weekend, though, we're finally going to see a little action.  Before you get too excited though, it'll probably be a wet, slushy mess.  And not too off the rails for a January storm. 

More on this in a bit. 

First, we need to look at the set up.  Yesterday, I told you about that atmospheric river shoving bucketloads of rain on the Pacific Northwest, causing flooding up there. 

The moisture's been wrung out of this weather system in the Cascade and Olympia mountains, but the energy in the atmosphere has not. 

A HUGE area covering all of Montana, the Dakotas and much of Nebraska, Kansas and Wyoming are under high wind warnings and watches, with expected gusts today and/or tomorrow up to 70 mph. 

Also proving that "fire season" is a thing of the past, and that it's practically all year nowadays, there are alerts for high or even extreme fire danger for rangeland fires in parts of the western Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Wyoming. Definitely out of season for that!

Southern California, too, is affected by this.  It's supposedly their rainy season, but no precipitation has come down there since December 28.  Strong Santa Ana winds could whip up fires in the Los Angeles basin and surrounding areas tomorrow.

VERMONT OUTLOOK

For us in Vermont, at least there's no danger of forest fires! 

By Friday, this energy in the atmosphere I've been talking about will start to congeal into a storm system around Minnesota, which will move east toward the eastern Great Lakes Saturday. 

A new storm, one that will be able to capture some Atlantic moisture, is forecast to form along the parent system's cold front and move northward into or near New England on Saturday. 

It won't be the most impressive storm ever, but it looks to be enough to give us precipitation of some sort. 

Normally, a storm moving up through central or eastern New England would put Vermont in the sweet spot for a nice accumulating snow.

The problem is, there's just not a lot of cold air around to support snow. It's going to be mild for the next few days (Highs in the 30s to near 40) and there's no real reservoir of cold air in Quebec for this potential storm to take advantage of.

The result is a weaker storm, and more importantly, a rainier one. We still might eek a wet snowstorm out of this late Friday night and Saturday. Temperatures will be marginal. But at this point, it looks like valleys stand a high chance of a cold rain instead, with maybe a little snow toward the end of the storm Saturday night. 

The mountains could get a decent snowfall out of this, we'll see.

Even worse for snow lovers, a few computer models take the storm even further west into the Hudson and Champlain Valleys, which would open the door for even milder air and rain up in the mountains as well as the valleys. 

Again, no matter what we get, this won't be the heaviest storm ever. Early indications are for a quarter to half inch of rain or water-equivalent snow. Just a middling storm.

That's just a possibility. We'll know more about the precipitation type and amounts as we draw nearer the storm.  

After the storm goes by, we sink back into the blah, boring weather we've had all month, though it will be colder than it's been. 

I'd said in an earlier post that a "sudden stratospheric warming" event would pull frigid Arctic air into the United States and maybe into Vermont. 

So far, the prospects of cold air looks less impressive than that previously advertised. When it gets "colder" here next week, we're talking normal January weather - highs in the 20s, lows in the single numbers and teens.