Nor'easter Behaving Just As Expected; Big Snow East Little In Vermont

Just sort of a snowy haze out there in St. Albans, Vermont 
early this morning as snow absolutely dumps along
the New England coast.

The forecasts that came out  yesterday regarding the nor'easter scooting by the Mid-Atlantic States and New England are proving to be quite accurate. 

A band of heavy snow went through parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Early this morning, this band was set up from near New York City to Boston.  

It's quite common to have a band of heavy snow to the north and west of a nor'easter's path, and that's exactly what's happening here. 

Snow in this band is falling at a rate of one to three inches per hour. Luckily, the storm is a quick mover, so these areas will only see a few hours of heavy snow.  Total accumulations in this region should come to about 6 to locally as high as 12 inches.

If that storm had hit Vermont, we'd call it just a mid-sized storm.

Here's the thing, though.  Not all six to 12 inch snowstorms are created equal.  Six inches of snow falling in three hours screws things up a lot more than when it takes a whole day to accumulate that much snow. 

Since this is hitting during the morning commute in southern and eastern New England, such heavy snow rates will be troublesome and I wonder if there will be more traffic nightmares today.  Plows have trouble keeping up with snow falling that fast, visibility sucks when it's snowing hard and people get stuck or wipe out. 

It's much easier to drive through light snow that takes all day to amount to six inches. 

Here in Vermont, the storm, as expected, is a yawner. A weak weather front is capturing some of the storm's moisture and depositing on the Green Mountain State as light snow and flurries. The storm is pulling down some colder air from Quebec, too.

It was warm-ish this morning with most of us in the mid-20s. But with that colder air coming in, temperatures will hold steady or slowly fall through the day.  That'll be a foretaste of what we'll see early next week. More on that in a moment. 

That colder air seeping in today will also help squeeze out some light snow. When the air gets colder, it can't hold as much moisture, so that moisture has to go somewhere. It'll come down as those snowflakes today.

Overall, most of us are looking at one to two inches of snow today.  Two inches will be generous and mostly east of the Green Mountains  The Green Mountains themselves might collect as much as four inches in spots. 

As noted, it will briefly be in the chilly side tonight and Saturday.  That strong Arctic front will be approaching Sunday.  Ahead of it, gusty south winds are still likely to bring us up into the upper 20s to upper 30s Sunday before the cold air pours in

The frigid air will come in with a couple of sharp fronts. Sunday's will be the first and we'll get a reinforcing shot, probably Monday morning.

It still looks brutal Monday morning through Wednesday morning. I'm sure the National Weather Service will be issuing wind chill alerts for that period. 

The "warm" spots, like the Banana Belt right along Lake Champlain will be in the single digits below zero Monday and Tuesday nights. Most of the rest of us will be in the teens below zero those nights. A few spots will make it to 20 below.  Daytime highs (ha!) will be within a few degrees either side of zero Tuesday afternoon.

This still looks like a quick shot of Arctic air, so by Wednesday afternoon, it should be near 20 degrees. That's not great, but not terrible. The end of next week will be closer to normal.

Snow lovers will hate this, but I still don't see any big dumps on the horizon.