January Warmth, Gloom Is Unsettling. With Video

The lawn in St. Albans, Vermont is looking rather 
green for January. Normally, this time of year, the lawn
is invisible beneath a layer of snow. 

 What a weird first week of January, 2023 in Vermont. 

This time of year, we expect snow on the ground, and almost continuous subfreezing temperatures. The occasional subzero morning should be de riguer. 

Instead, it's warm, like March, and really murky and foggy. There's no snow on the ground anywhere, except for a thin scrim of it up in the mountains. 

The ground underfoot isn't frozen. Disturbingly, at least in my yard in northern Vermont, daffodil shoots have made a happy, spring green appearance. Only two and a half months ahead of schedule. 

The forsythia bush is budding. The tiny brook by my house, which we dubbed the Woof River, is running fast and strong, like it does in late March. There's no ice along the Woof River, like you'd expect. 

Video that gives you an idea of how weirdly foggy, gloomy, warm and springlike is at the bottom of this post 

As warm as it's been in northern Vermont, we partly missed out on the latest mild surge.  The entirety of the eastern third of the United States has been engulfed in record warmth in the first few days of this January.

Washington DC was in the 60s on each of the first five days of January, the first time on record that has happened. Overnight lows Wednesday were up in the 50s as far north as New York City.  

Motorist make their way through dense fog along
Interstate 89 in St. Albans on Thursday.

Back here in Vermont, temperatures are forecast to settle down to something a little closer to normal for January in the next few days. 

It won't get super cold, but at least things will start to feel a little closer to normal. Not at normal. But closer. It might even snow a little in southern and eastern Vermont today, of all things. 

Speaking of normal, weather this extreme is not quite our new normal.  At least not yet.  We're still very capable of having a real winter here in northern Vermont. 

I can remind you of last January, which really did feel like the usual frigid punch of winter. In January, 2022, it was at or below zero on no fewer than 16 days. At least two inches of snow covered the ground every day of the month. 

It's still definitely possible we'll have a winter this year. Even in the banana belt of Vermont's Champlain Valley, subzero weather can happen into late March. Large snowstorms can hit as late as mid-April, as they did last year, and the year before. 

With climate change though, we're more likely than in the past to have these spells of springtime in winter. It's already happening more often than it once did. Just two years ago, it was 65 degrees on Christmas Day. Some towns in Vermont were pushing 70 degrees last year in the first week of March.

It'll get below zero at some point this winter. Probably. It will even snow. Hopefully. But given that we're into January now, this looks like it might be a short winter. 

Video: Check out the weird, murky, warm weather of early January, 2023 in northern Vermont. Click on this link if you don't see the video image below. Otherwise, click on the image below: