Nice Weekend Continues. Then A Chilly Week, But Does Indian Summer Follow

An orange forest on a nice Saturday yesterday in St. Albans,
Vermont. Despite the recent heavy rains, beautiful fall
foliage manages to linger in parts of the state.

 After that very soggy rainstorm Thursday night and Friday, it has turned out to be a delightful weekend across Vermont. 

It's true that the storm at the end of the week has muted the fall foliage, but it's still looking pretty spectacular in the Champlain Valley and in the low elevations of southern Vermont. Northern Vermont still has splashes of color here and there, too, so all is not lost. Not yet anyway. 

Today - Sunday - is essentially a rerun of Saturday except that it will be a little cooler, and there might be a few extra clouds the further northwest you go. Enjoy today, because it all goes downhill somewhat for the upcoming week. 

We're about to have the coolest week we've had in Vermont since April. If you hate cold weather, relax.  The chilly upcoming weather will be pretty typical for late October. 

The nippy weather that's in the forecast does not seem like it will be as cold as some earlier forecasts indicated. It might be also a little less wet and a little less, ahem, snowy than previously advertised. 

Scattered showers will linger, especially in the mountains Monday night through Tuesday night. It'll almost surely be cold enough on the summits to allow for snow.  Snow flurries might still extend down to some valley floors.  A couple days ago, I was more sure that many valleys would see their first snowflakes of the season. 

Now, I'm not so sure. Some will. In any event, it's not quite time to get your snow shovels out of storage.  

In any event, snow flurries aren't at all unusual this time of year. In the Banana Belt of Burlington, the average date of the first autumn snow flurry is October 15.  That first flurry typically comes earlier than that in much of the rest of northern Vermont.

Burlington's first snow flurry of the season has come as early as September 20 in 1956 and 1991.  The earliest first inch accumulation was on October 9, 1979 and the earliest three inches was on October 10, 1925.

I guarantee Burlington will NOT see an inch of snow, never mind three inches, this week. 

It'll stay cool and mostly dry for the second half of the upcoming week, (Highs within a few degrees either side of 50, lows near the freezing mark.)

I don't entirely trust long range forecasts, but for what it's worth, I'm seeing signs of a pattern change that would give us mostly warmer than normal temperatures for the last ten days or so of the month. 

No guarantees on this, and even if the weather pattern turns warmer, there would still probably be some chilly days thrown in that mix, but dare we say we could be up for an Indian Summer in a little over a week?