Meteorological Winter In Vermont: A Really Mixed Bag

A wintry landscape in South Hero, Vermont during a 
chilly January, 2022.  Temperatures and precipitation
were all over the place during the winter, but if you
average it out, temperatures stay mixed, but the 
winter overall was dry in the Green Mountain State.

 Yesterday, I took a look back at February's weather in Vermont and talked about what a mixed bag it was.

Today as we look back at all of meteorological winter, and it, too reflected a muddled season. But the winter did have a theme. 

It was on the dry side, there wasn't all that much snow, and we had a lot of mid-sized, but not epic storms.  

Meteorological winter runs from December 1 through February 28.  The dates are arbitrary, designed for ease of record keeping because the include complete months. And this all makes sense, since December, January and February are the coldest months of the year. 

January, normally the coldest part of winter, was especially cold. But that frigid January was bookended by a relatively mild December and February. 

When you add it all up Vermont temperatures for meteorological winter were mixed.  Burlington came in at 1.1 degrees chillier than normal, mostly because of that frigid January. Meanwhile, the winter as a whole was 2.6 degrees warmer than average in Montpelier, and just a hair milder than normal in St. Johnsbury. 

Storms were frequent, but for the most part weren't huge around here, Especially compared to the epic atmospheric river storms in West during December, and the repeated bouts of tornadoes, floods, severe weather and winter storms in the South.

Up here in Vermont, storms often came in from the west, meaning they didn't have a great moisture supply. Or, some storms  did have a good moisture supply but passed far enough west or east of Vermont to make us avoid heavy precipitation.

The bottom line was a lot of wind, but not much snow and rain. Since those mid-sized storms seemed to spray at us from all directions, we had a lot of bouts with freezing rain, sleet and schmutz over the winter. Even when we did receive decent snows, the accumulations disappeared pretty quickly amid the brief thaws and mixed precipitation

January was especially dry, since the air flow that month came mostly from Canada, where the air is cold and dry. I mean, why do you think that brand of ginger ale is called Canada Dry?

In January Burlington, Montpelier and St. Johnsbury could not even manage an inch of rain and melted snow and ice. Burlington's January total was 0.94 inches. But since January is a relatively dry month to begin with, that wasn't one of the top ten driest Januaries on record.

Still, overall, precipitation only amounted to right around five inches for the three winter months, which is nearly an inch and a half below normal.  Montpelier's winter was a little more than two inches on the dry side, and St. Johnsbury's precipitation deficit was 1.73 inches.

This dryness translates to a lack of snow. Most of Vermont was five to 15 inches shy of normal for snowfall during meteorological winter. 

You can see this trend atop Mount Mansfield. At this point in the season, there's normally 65 inches of snow at the stake near the mountain's summit. As of Monday, the snow depth there was only 48 inches. 

February was a little wetter, as we managed to see enough storms to get us a bit above normal for precipitation in the final weeks of meteorological winter.

Although temperatures yo-yo' a lot during this just ended meteorological winter, we didn't have much in the way of record warmth or record cold. Several daily record highs were established in mid-December around the region, an a couple more were set in late February, but we didn't have any unprecedented warmth that we've had in several recent winters.

A handful of daily record lows were established in the worst of the January cold waves, but those temperatures never even came close to all time lows for the winter.