Record Warmth Ends; Despite Mud Underfoot, It's Too Dry In Vermont

Talk about rapid snow melt! Here's what my back yard
in St. Albans, Vermont looked like Wednesday morning.....

As snow melted rapidly in and near Vermont Thursday, it became awfully muddy underfoot.  Mud season came in big time.   

That will temporarily freeze up this weekend, but more mud awaits later in the month, as it does every March. 

Believe it or not, though, with all this mud around, things are still too dry around here. We still need precipitation! Pretty much the entire state is still in drought or at least abnormally dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Precipitation has been mostly below normal in Vermont almost every month for a year now.  Ground water levels are below normal. The spring snow melt will help temporarily, but unless storms stop insisting on avoiding Vermont, the drought will deepen going into spring and summer. 

As gorgeous as yesterday's record highs were,  I think it actually hurt the cause of keeping us out of a potentially a more serious drought. The snow melted super fast, which meant a lot of that stored up water in the snow ran off instead of soaking into the ground. A more gradual thaw would have been better. 

......and here's the same view of my back yard just 
48 hours later, taken this morning. 

But that record heat really banished the snow.  Some snow is still left, and will melt slowly. But we lost some potential ground water yesterday in those warm temperatures. 

It's worth it to stop here and go over some of those record highs:

Burlington: 64 degrees, old record 56 set in 1977.    

Montpelier, 62 degrees, tying the old record set in 1977. 

St. Johnsbury, 62, old record 52 set in 2012.                                                                                                                        Elsewhere in Vermont, it reached 68 degrees in Rutland and 72 degrees in Bennington. 

Record highs were broken throughout the Northeast and southeastern Canada. Some examples Boston reached 74 degrees, Worcester, Massachusetts 70, Providence, Rhode Island 72, Newark, New Jersey, 75 and Philadelphia, 74.

In Canada, a record high of 65 degrees was reached in Toronto, and Ottawa reached a record 55 degrees.    

Now, back to the dry weather. 

After just slightly below precipitation in Vermont during the winter, March is off to a bad start. Burlington, Vermont has had only 0.11 inches of precipitation so far this month. There should have been 0.74 inches by now. 

As sharply colder air comes in for the weekend, two rounds of snow showers are expected to drop less than a tenth of an inch of melted precipitation. That's really not much at all, practically nothing 

The forecast weather pattern for at least the next week or two continues to show storms either weakening dramatically on approach to Vermont or going by to the south. 

All of us want sunny spring weather in late March, April and May. Even with intervals of bright weather, we really need some soaking, drenching rains going into the spring.   

We're really going to need a weather pattern shift and soon, in which frequent storms dump boatloads of water on us. Dreary spring weather might really turn out to be your friend.