A Meso-Low, Another Snow Dusting, Another Arctic Blast, And That Weekend Storm

A well-defined meso-low captured on radar at around
8 a.m this morning east of Watertown, New York. These
are essentially mini-storms. As you can see in this
image, they look like little hurricanes, with a central
eye and rotating bands of in this case snow rotating
around that eye. Winter meso-lows are cool, but
not that dangerous. .Winds increase somewhat under them
and you can get briefly heavy snow.

 As expected, we got a little installment of light snow across much of Vermont last night.  It looks like most of us got about an inch of snow, in line with forecasts.  

There's an interesting feature captured on radar this morning, at least for us weather geeks.  A well-defined mini-weather system, called a meso-low, was swirling just inland from Lake Ontario around Watertown, New York as of around 7 a.m. today. 

A wintertime meso-low is miniature storm system, essentially.  It often looks like a small hurricane on satellite and radar images. Sometimes they even have an eye like a hurricane.  

Meso lows in the winter aren't really dangerous. If one passes overhead, you'd see an increase in winds and a burst of moderate to briefly heavy precipitation. 

 Winter meso-lows usually form over the Great Lakes. Today's developed over Lake Ontario and made "landfall"' near Watertown, New York. 

As today's example moves eastward, I'm not sure whether the meso-low will hang on to its definition as it crosses the Adirondacks heads toward Vermont.  Whether it hangs together or not, this mini-system will probably create some snow showers, some of which might be briefly moderate, as it passes through today.  

What IS a biggie is the yet another Arctic blast scheduled to pour down upon us tonight, and a large storm that might or might not affect Vermont over the weekend. 

First, the cold. We know the drill by now. Temperatures will crash down below zero tonight, stay in the single numbers tomorrow, then drop like a rock into the teens and 20s below zero again tomorrow night. We've been through this a few times this month already, and it's old hat now. Or it's just getting old. Take your pick. 

Yet another Arctic cold front comes in Friday, but there's a twist.  It looks like that front will slow down to our east, and a storm will move northward along the front, or pretty close to it. 

Forecasters are getting pretty confident this storm will be a strong one by Saturday.  Somebody's going to get nailed.  We see potential for people somewhere to endure possible blizzard conditions, damaging winds and destructive storm surges with this one. 

But where? And what's in it for Vermont?

Nobody is sure yet. The storm is a good four days away, so forecasters can't really nail down a track yet.

Early indications are eastern New England would get the brunt of this one. Most, but not all of the computer models take the heaviest snow east of Vermont.  Under this scenario, we might get light snow, and gusty north winds would create problems with blowing snow and wind chills, but the real action would happen in places like Massachusetts and Maine. 

Stay tuned on this one, as it really needs to be watched. If not for Vermont, then other parts of New England. If the storm track ends up being just a little further westward than some computer models are currently suggesting, at least parts of the Green Mountain State could get a big dump of snow. 

When you finally get a big storm in a cold weather pattern we've experiencing, it's sometimes a sign that a change in the weather pattern is in the offing.  That might be the case here, as preliminary signs are surfacing of at least somewhat milder weather arriving in about a week or so.