An Extremely Strange Weather Sunday In Vermont; Eastern U.S. Flooding Today

Well, that was weird.

Fascinating visible satellite image from Sunday afternoon. 
Smooth clouds in northern Vermont were low clouds and
fog. Notice how it was able to dip south through most
of the Champlain Valley but couldn't clear the
Green Mountains. So northwest Vermont was chilly
most of rest of state warm. You can also see
showers starting to form south of the low clouds.
Then clearing in Quebec from Montreal north. 

Sunday had to be the oddest weather day of the year in Vermont, or at least close.  

Nobody in Vermont experienced any record high or record low temperatures. Rainfall amounts, if you got any, weren't remarkable. But if there were records kept for strange weather, we would have broken that record.

Temperatures were all over the place, and you only had to travel a few miles to experience two different seasons. At one point, temperatures in Vermont ranged from 53 to 86 degrees. 

In other areas, it was a muggy summer night in the pre-dawn hours, only to be a chilly autumn day during the afternoon.

Take Burlington for example. On paper, Sunday looked like a typical September day. The high was 73 degrees, the low as 58 degrees. That's right about normal for this time of year.

But that 73 degree reading was just after midnight Sunday morning, and that 58 degree temperature was in the middle of the afternoon. Overnight last night, the temperature stayed right there at 58 degrees. A chilly September afternoon became a mild September night. 

Pity the poor person who traveled less than 40 miles from one part of the state to another. If you were in Montpelier Sunday afternoon, it was about 80 degrees, partly sunny and kinda humid. Driving that 39 miles to Burlington would put you in a chilly north wind, temperatures in the upper 50s and an annoying drizzle.

The shorts and t-shirt you were wearing in Montpelier wouldn't cut it on Burlington's Church Street Marketplace thats for sure.

The weather also improved in Quebec, too.  Skies cleared in Montreal, leading to a sunny, pleasant late afternoon. From my perch in St. Albans, you could see the low clouds and fog abruptly end on the northern horizon, just over the border in Quebec. 

Any rainfall that came along Sunday was kind of goofy, too. It wasn't really suppose to rain much north of the front. But in the chilly air, I collected a quarter of inch in some brief downpours in St. Albans. But it was hit a miss. Equally chilly Burlington only had a trace of rain in a few brief bouts of drizzle.

Toward late afternoon, showers in the southern Adirondacks well northwest of Glens Falls and south of the front just sat there, sending anvil clouds all the way to Rutland. Another stationary patch of showers in central New Hampshire prompted some flash flood warnings Sunday evening. 

Meanwhile, way up north isolated showers zipped along west to east across northern New York and Vermont.   Depending on where showers were, they either moved quickly, or not at all. It was another weird aspect to Sunday's weather. 

Low clouds and fog in St. Albans, Vermont Sunday,
but on the horizon, you could see clear blue skies
just across the border in Quebec.

The national weather pattern contributed to Vermont's weird weather and even that was odd. If you're going to get a bout of rain and thunderstorms, the moisture supply usually comes from the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean.

Sunday's moisture supply came from the southern Pacific Ocean near Baja, California, then on to the northern Gulf of Mexico and then up the East Coast.

All this is a harbinger of a potentially dangerous flood day in much of the eastern United States, though Vermont will be mostly a bystander. 

FLOODING WIDESPREAD

Flood watches are up today for the Appalachians from Alabama to Pennsylvania, then eastward to southern and coastal New England as far north as Maine. 

Within this zone, pockets of flooding have already started. Nearly a foot of rain deluged parts of northwestern Georgia Sunday, causing severe flooding.  Early this morning, flash flood warnings were up in parts of Ohio, and in a patch of Massachusetts just north of Boston. 

This issue will become more widespread as the day wears on.  Some areas near the Pennsylvania/New York border could see up to five inches of rain today. Pockets of heavier rain and flooding are a nearly equally good bet where heavy showers are persistent.

Here in Vermont, we're mostly sitting this one out. Far southern Vermont could see downpours heavy enough to cause some minor issues, but I don't think there will be anything widespread in the Green Mountain State.

South central  Vermont, places that are in rough proximity to Route 4, should receive a decent, needed soaking. Maybe a half inch to up to an inch there. Rainfall is still forecast to taper off a lot as you head north and west. 

Places like Burlington and St. Albans are expected a very underwhelming tenth of an inch of rain or less. There were some uncertain signs that the rain in southern Vermont might make a run a little further north than predicted today, which would be good news to alleviate the dry conditions. But that prospect looked iffy at best. 

After this episode of rain, it still looks like we'll have a long run of dry, warm weather starting Tuesday and lasting until at least Sunday.