Huge Part Of U.S. Under Winter Storm Alerts, Including Vermont

That huge area of blue and pink you see on today's 
National Weather Service home page is due to the
expected wide ranging storm that will affect
a huge area from New Mexico to New England.

A well-advertised winter storm is beginning to take shape and will hit a huge, huge area of the nation. Winter storm watches, warnings and alerts extend in a broad band from New Mexico to Vermont.

I'll get more into the Vermont effects in a bit, but we'll give the broad brush.  

As we said yesterday, a slow moving Arctic cold front is slowly pushing into a thick, rich and increasing feed of deep moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.  The front this morning extended from the western Great Lakes to about Kansas, and hasn't really interacted with the wet air from the Gulf yet.

But it will. By tomorrow the front will only have made it to roughly a Toronto to Oklahoma line. Thursday afternoon, it will have moved even more slowly, extending from roughly Quebec City through us here in northern Vermont then southwestward all the way to Texas. On Friday, it will probably extend from southern New England to the central Gulf Coast.

That, my friends, is a really slow mover for this time of year. 

All this means that people living near the front will spend a long time under that Gulf of Mexico moisture.  That wet air will be forced to rise up and over the cold air behind the front.  Just behind the front, freezing rain will fall. As the cold air gets thicker as the front slowly heads southeastward,  the ice changes to snow.

This is why that huge area from Santa Fe to St. Johnsbury are under winter weather watches and alerts.  This will be a mess of power outages, deep snow and travel nightmares Wednesday through at least Friday, depending upon where you are.  

Forecasters see potential for ice heavy enough to damage trees and power lines in parts of the Midwest, and up to 18 inches of snow or even  more north of the ice band. Since there's so much moisture available, precipitation along and behind the cold front will come down hard.

The worst of the ice storm will probably extend from eastern Texas to Pennsylvania, and possibly on into southwestern New England, with the nastiest of it hitting Missouri, southern Illinois and Indiana, as it looks now.

The heaviest snow between now and Friday looks like it will go from eastern Kansas all the way to perhaps the northwestern half of New England. Which leads us to what might happen here in Vermont.

VERMONT EFFECTS

 The full effects of this won't hit us until Thursday, so there's still a lot of question marks as to how exactly this will play out in the Green Mountain State and where the worst bullseye is for us  

Forecasters are confident enough of something happening to issue a winter storm watch from Rutland and Windsor counties north from the predawn hours Thursday through Friday afternoon.  That means we have a shot at receiving six inches of snow or more, but it's not a slam dunk yet. If it becomes apparent this will definitely happen, then the watch would be upgraded to a warning. We'll wait and see on that. 

We're still in the same boat we were yesterday, trying to figure out where the slow cold front will be during the time the deepest moisture passes through New England.

Some models have Arctic high pressure from Quebec asserting itself more. If that happens, it's possible far northern Vermont might get less snow and get cheated out of a lot of needed moisture, once again. (The "precipitation hole" over northern Vermont has been more or less going on for over two years now  for some reason)

We don't know at all at this point whether this dry Arctic air will win, and northern areas might still receive a ton of snow out of this, hence the winter storm watch for the entire area. 

Ahead of the cold front, it will turn mild Wednesday. Wednesday night will actually feature some light rain as temperatures stay above freezing. Depending upon the timing of the front, temperatures will start to sink below freezing and rain will change to snow from northwest to southeast across the Green Mountain State.

This will be a mess everywhere, as the wet roads will freeze, then snow will cover them.  This could arrive in time to mess with the Thursday morning commute in northern areas. The roads will probably also be a disaster Thursday evening and Friday morning, so keep that in mind.

Since the front will be slow moving, much of the snow will fall in the warmish air near it. That means heavy, wet snow could pile up before things turn more powdery.  We'll have to think about tree and power line damage because of this.  This scenario looks  most likely in southern Vermont at this point.  

It could be made worse if a period of freezing rain breaks out in southern Vermont before things go to snow. Some forecasts do indicate some freezing rain in that area for awhile, but we'll have to watch those details as we draw closer to the event. 

The cold front and its snow should slowly push southeastward out of Vermont during Friday afternoon and evening. 

I'm hoping by tomorrow afternoon we'll have a better handle on where in Vermont the heaviest snow will fall, the timing of it, and about how much accumulation we'll actually get. This definitely seems to have the potential to be the biggest snowfall of the winter so far in a few parts of the Green Mountain State anyway.