WHOOSH! Yucky Vermont Humidity Being Swept Away - For Now

At the Car Wash: A torrential downpour Saturday morning
washes off my truck. The downpour is heralding a 
much anticipated and loved change in the air to 
really comfortable levels.

 For most early risers this Saturday morning, it was another muggy, sticky morning in Vermont. Pretty yucky.   

But for many of us looking at the skies, we could see changes were afoot, and we're in for a delightful break for an awful, Florida-like week.  Weve been saying all week this break would be coming today and I'm here to confirm it. 

Dense, dark, heavy clouds rolled into northwestern Vermont after dawn, giving the morning a dark, threatening appearance.

Those clouds unleashed several brief, but intense downpours, including at my place in St. Albans, Vermont. I saw a few flashes of lightning and heard a few rumbles of thunder, too. 

 Which is great, since northern Vermont north of Route 2 needs the rain and this is the last good wetting we'll get for several days at least. Some of this rain was really torrential. Burlington, Vermont got an impressive 1.1 inches of rain within an hour, causing some local street flooding. 

The heavy showers were more hit than miss in northern Vermont, which is great.  They might take on a more scattered nature as they head south and east through Vermont, but a few local torrential downpours and maybe a few lightning strikes will happen here and there through the morning. 

These storms signal the WHOOSH we needed, as they are lined up along the cold front that is giving us this welcome break. While muggy thunderstorms were ongoing in Vermont's Champlain Valley, humidity had already crashed to comfortable levels in northwestern New York. That wonderful air was making a beeline toward us.

A quick downpour formed directly overhead in St. Albans in
the tropical air Friday evening, dropping about 0.12 inches of 
rain in five minutes. A little garden wetting. Here, that
downpour is departing toward the Northeast. Look
very closely and you can see a faint rainbow at the
base of the cloud near the tree line. 

You'll notice a dramatic change in the air as we go through the day, and this evening will go solidly into the "aaaaahhhhhh!" category.

Don't have air conditioning and you're craving a good night's sleep?  Crack the windows wide open tonight and let those cool breezes in. It'll be down in the 50s by early morning for pretty much all of us, with some upper 40s in the cool spots.

Ready for a hike or something else to do outside without wilting?  Sunday's your day! Under sunny skies, temperatures will end up only in the 70s.  Even better, dew points, a gauge of how humid it is, will stay down in the 50s. That's solidly in the comfort zone. 

Enjoy it while it lasts. Each day starting Monday will be a little warmer, and a little more humid than the day before. By Wednesday and Thursday, we start to get a little uncomfortable again, but it won't be as bad as the week we just had.  

Northern Vermont will dry out again, as no rain is expected after today for awhile. We start to get into the scattered afternoon shower and storm regime for the second half of the week, but so far, rainfall later in the week doesn't look all that impressive to me.