Weather Excitement Upcoming For Most Of Nation, But Vermont Stays Boring

Precipitation forecast for the nation from NOAA's 
Weather Prediction. Forecast covers the next seven days. 
All those blues, purples and oranges suggest a lot of
precipitation across the nation from a stormy pattern.
But notice the lack of precipitation in New England
as the storms miss us. 

Usually, when us weather geeks tell you the U.S. is in for an active weather pattern, that means buckle your seat belt, this will be a wild ride. 

For much of the nation, this will be true over the next week or so.  For us Vermonters, though, well, yawn.  Things might start to get interesting starting in a little over a week. But until then -- meh.

This active weather pattern setting up means storms will generally travel in quick succession from west to east across the United States. 

When you get a pattern like that in the winter, you usually run into all kinds of weather hazards. 

This is no exception. 

The issue for us Vermonters is, the storm track is squashed too far to the south to give us much of anything. Chilly high pressure in Canada will dominate all week. That will suppress the storms to the south of us. Around here, we'll get flurries from time to time, especially in the mountains, but that's about it. 

And it will stay cold, but not extreme. (Highs 15-22, lows a few degrees either side of zero most nights for the upcoming week).

The first of those cross-country storms is organizing in the southern Rockies and will spread a stripe of snow from Nebraska to Pennsylvania over the next few days. 

That storm will also include some icy weather along the southern fringe of the snow stripe. It could also help pop up a few severe thunderstorms in northern Texas tomorrow. 

That storm will tend to shear out and weaken as it exits the Middle Atlantic East Coast Tuesday.

Quickly on its heels, energy with another system coming in from the west will spin up a new storm in the Southeast Wednesday. This one has a decent chance of developing quickly, and could end up giving quite a nor'easter type storm to the Mid-Atlantic states toward the end of the week. 

By the way, even this scenario is iffy. Some forecasts blow this storm up into something big, others predict a lame system.  Either way, it will miss us Vermonters. 

That late week storm will eventually head out to sea well south of New England and probably become a  powerful system out over the ocean by Friday. 

The storm parade continues after that. The storms I just talked about will have finally given California some badly needed light to moderate rains. These have hopefully put an end once and for all to the very extended wildfire season in California that has oddly extended into mid-January. 

A more powerful storm, or even a series of strong storms, seem set to hit California starting later in the week. The torrential rains expected with a West Coast storm around Thursday could set off some dangerous debris flows in areas hit by those big wildfires this past summer, fall and early winter. 

Some of the stronger storms hitting California starting Thursday, or the left over energy from them, have the potential to come far enough north to affect us here in Vermont with finally a little excitement to start off February.  That's a big if, but it's worth watching for.