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| The warm March sun melted a light coating of snow off my St. Albans, Vermont driveway yesterday. No such luck today. We got another inch of snow, but it's much, much colder than Wednesday. |
Most of us in woke up this morning to one or two inches of snow, just like we did yesterday. Areas right in the immediate Champlain Valley like around Burlington, barely managed a dusting both mornings.
Today will play out a lot differently than yesterday, though.
True, the sun is coming out, just like it did Wednesday. But we're not going to have the benefit of that strengthening March sun to melt away the flurries like we did yesterday. Instead we're getting what might be the last good blast of winter cold of the season.
Temperatures this morning are crashing behind a cold front, and nobody will make it into the 30s like yesterday. Northern areas were in the 20s before dawn and were already in the teens by 8 a.m. Those areas will stay in the teens all day, which is a good 20 degrees colder than normal.
For a lot of us, tomorrow morning might well be the last subzero weather we'll have until next winter. No guarantees, as we can get subzero weather all the way to late March, but the chances of below zero weather after tomorrow are rapidly decreasing.
Except in the usual cold hollows, where it will probably go below zero again later this month. Sorry, Island Pond and Saranac Lake!
We'll still have wintry cold spells through this month and into April, but they will be diminishing in intensity.
It will still be cold but for the season Friday and most of Saturday, but quiet. But then things change, as they always do in March.
Two storms have our eyes on us here in Vermont. I don't think either will be a blockbuster, but they'll still screw around with things a bit.
The first one will crank up in the central Plains and move into the Great Lakes Saturday and Saturday night, then well to our north Sunday.
It's interesting that NOAA's Severe Storm Center has been bullish on a severe storm and possible tornado outbreak in Iowa with this on Saturday. That would be pretty far north for such weather this early in the season. And it comes just a few months after a tornado outbreak last December 15 that broke records for tornadoes that far north.
The storm will obviously not create any tornadoes for us here in Vermont, but it will come with its own, somewhat more mundane hazards.
The storm will fling a warm front at us Saturday night, which will collide with lingering cold air over us. That means a bout of freezing rain and sleet Saturday night and early Sunday which would of course mess up the road conditions.
The good news is it will rapidly warm up on Sunday, changing everything to plain rain. Temperatures in some Vermont towns could reach the low 50s.
It doesn't look like this system will produce nearly enough rain to produce flooding. It could jiggle the remaining ice around on area rivers, which might cause a few problems with ice jams.
Hot on the first system's heels, Storm Number 2 comes in around Tuesday. It's unclear so far what this one is going to do, as it looks like it will go right over us or just to our south.
That would mean we'd get a slug of snow and/or mixed precipitation. It's too soon to tell how Tuesday's storm will affect us, so we'll just monitor it for now.
The relatively chilly air coming in behind Tuesday's storm won't have nearly the oomph of what's coming in today, so the cold during the middle of next week won't be dastardly. Instead, it will be just something we expect in March.
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