Sign Of Season: Lake Effect Showers - Then More Unsettled Weather

It's that time of year, as sunshine becomes more rare in
Vermont this time of year: Gray skies, a fading garden and
tree leaves turning color this morning in St. Albans, Vermont.

 It was kind of rainy overnight and early this morning in much of the Champlain Valley of Vermont.

Everyone in Vermont is a bit damp, but the rain focused along the shores of Lake Champlain. The reason: Lake effect showers. 

That's a sure sign of the season.  That rain formed exactly the way lake effect snows develop in the winter. 

There's a rather moist air flow from the north to begin with. That air then flows over the lake. 

 The lake water is warmer than the air, so it's able to add more moisture to the air - think steam rising from your morning cup of hot coffee in your chilly kitchen. 

What is essentially that steam from the lake adds more moisture to the air. The wind then has to rise up over the land and the hills east of Lake Champlain.  The wetness in that rising air gets wrung out as showers. 

This kind of thing can't happen in summer because to get these showers, the water has to be warmer than the air above, not vice versa.  Had this been winter, places from Burlington south into northwestern Rutland County would have gotten a couple inches of snow.

Speaking of which, I don't think the mountain tops of Vermont got any snow last night.  Forecasts indicated it would get possibly cold enough for that to happen. As of early this morning, it was 37 degrees atop Mount Mansfield.  That's cold enough for perhaps a few wet snowflakes, but I haven't see any observations saying that happened.

 I do see that over in New Hampshire, taller Mount Washington was down to 28 degrees with rime ice forming.

Going forward, the weather is going to remain in that term I hate - unsettled.  That word feels so wishy-washy. It implies boring, with no real certainty as to what will happen out there.

Unfortunately, that's the situation we're in.  The weather pattern is stuck, with that upper low just to our northeast pinwheeling little disturbances through here.  So there's always a chance of a shower, but you never know when.

Any showers that do hit don't look like they'll amount to much over the next couple of days.

On top of that, another storm from the southwest will take a run at us over the weekend and early next week, but it's unclear how much progress it will make toward us because of the gummed up weather pattern. 

It will probably be able to spread some showers our way Sunday or Monday but will eventually get pushed back southward by that pinwheeling, stalled upper level low to our northeast, and a high pressure system over Canada.

This all makes forecasting the weather over the next several days rather iffy, or if you want to use that word, unsettled.