Statewide Line Of Severe Storms Tuesday, But At Least The Smoke (Temporarily) Cleared

Interesting visible satellite view of the Northeast U.S.
and southeast Canada this morning. You can see
the milky tone of the thick smoke in the Mid-Atlantic
states that affected Vermont Tuessday. There's clouds
over Vermont/northern New York and clear, smoke-
free air in Quebec the cleaner air is headed 
in our direction. 
Vermont Tuesday

 It's actually kind of rare that the entire state of Vermont goes under a series of severe thunderstorm warnings for a single line of storms, but we accomplished that last evening. 

Everybody from Alburgh to Vernon got a good thunderstorm out of this.  Not everyone had severe, damaging storms, but reports of high winds and flooding came from all corners of Vermont with this. 

On the bright side, everybody got beneficial rain out of it, though southern Vermont at this point doesn't really need the rain.  

The storms also temporarily dramatically improved air quality, as the rain washed the dense wildfire smoke that had been hanging in the air, prompting air quality alerts.

Fancy pants meteorologists would define what went through Vermont last evening as a quasi-linear convective system or QLCS.   A QLCS is a particular type of squall line ahead of a cold front, and they can be pretty nasty. 

For our purposes, we'll just call it a line of thunderstorms, or a squall line. It originated way up in central Ontario, Canada during the late morning and made its way southeastward into northwestern New York in the afternoon and into and across Vermont in the evening. The line of damaging storms made its way all the way across southern and central New Hampshire to the coast.

Parts of this squall line had some pretty intense lightning. I have to wonder if the smoke particles in the atmosphere encouraged some of that. 

While there was tree and wire damage reported in spots across Vermont, it appears two of the hardest hit areas were around Burlington, and around Orange County in eastern Vermont. 

In Burlington, more than an inch of rain fell in less than an hour, flooding streets. The city reported a total of 1.24 inches of rain yesterday. Right around an inch of rain fell on my St. Albans, Vermont property. Not exactly record breaking, but it was still the wettest day here so far this year. 

A large tree fell on St. Paul Street in Burlington, smushing two vehicles. Another tree fell on Interstate 89 in Burlington. 

It looks like a power outage or wind screwed up automatic weather data at the Burlington International Airport as we still don't know the peak wind gust in the storm there. Hourly Burlington weather observations were still not working on the National Weather Service web site as of 7 a.m. today, but it looks like it was fixed soon after that. 

After the storm, a brighter setting sun as the rain washed
smoke out of the air, and a bit of a rainbow, too. Photo
taken in St. Albans, Vermont 

In Norwich and Thetford  there were reports of many, many trees down, blocking roads. Some power outages lingered in Orange County, Vermont early this morning. 

An area along the squall line near those two towns seems to exhibit some rotation, but it's unknown whether any tornadic activity occurred. 

Yesterday's storms might be the end of the decent rains most of Vermont has been getting lately.  

In northern Vermont this morning, it was murky with fog and drizzle. Showers and a few thundershowers will blossom and be scattered about this afternoon, but no severe weather is forecast. 

North winds over the next couple of days is bringing much cleaner air in from northern Quebec. At least for now, air pollution from western wildfires shouldn't be nearly as much of a problem as it was on Tuesday. 

We'll go into a northwesterly flow for the next week or more. That means frequent quick moving weather systems will come through, each of them with their own batch of showers and storms. But they won't have all that much moisture to work with, so any showers will be quick hitting and not amount to all that much in this upcoming weather pattern.