"Kitchen Sink" Weather Comes To Vermont, Still A Mess Out

UPDATE 5 PM FRIDAY

National Weather Service radar image from around 8 a.m
today shows a cluster of thunderstorms in and around 
Rutland, and a hail-producing cell over St. Albans.  

The storm is pretty much over, save for some lingering flurries in the Champlain Valley and Green Mountains. 

It's amazing how accurate the National Weather Service office in South Burlington was with this forecast.

Any time you have wide temperature differences and quick changes in precipitation types, you're almost guaranteed to get parts of the forecast wrong. 

Not this time. 

Things were a little wonkier than forecast with the thunderstorms and hail. But NWS Burlington did mention the possibility of thunder in some of their forecasts,

For such a tricky forecast, I'm amazed they got the amount of ice correctly, and the amount of snow that followed the ice. For the record, at my place in St. Albans, I got 1.6 inches of snow. 0.3 inches of sleet and more or less 0.05 inches of ice from freezing rain. 

More incredibly, NWS Burlington was spot on with the timing of the changeovers from rain to freezing rain to snow. 

I would say road conditions in northern Vermont - at least the main roads - are definitely better than they were during this morning's mixed precipitation. But I'd advise going slow and taking care. It's not perfect out there, that's for sure. 

It's still looking like a nice day Saturday after a cold start.  Sunday and Monday will bring some thawing to melt the ice. 

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The good news is I haven't seen any reports of locust swarms in Vermont today. 

But it's been a "kitchen sink" kind of day as every imaginable type of weather has hit, except of course no kitchen sinks falling out of the sky. That I know of. 

We've had the expected rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow. But also thunderstorms, especially across central Vermont. Oh, and hail.  Did I mention hail? Another thunderstorm-like thing came through St. Albans this morning, dumping a quick, heavy shot of hail. Most of the stones were a little bigger than peas. 

The hail was mixed with freezing drizzle. Lovely. 

We've also had every kind of temperature you could get, too. At 10 a.m., it was 22 degrees with snow in Highgate. At the same time, it was 57 degrees in Bennington. 

So yeah, it was about as weird a winter morning as you can get in Vermont. 

The roads are bad as you might imagine, except in areas to the south and east which as of noon hadn't gotten below freezing yet.

It will remain nasty through the afternoon, but the extremes are settling down. As of 1 p.m. or so, all the freezing rain and sleet had turned to snow in the Champlain Valley. Central Vermont was still seeing that ice, but that should go over to snow soon. (Montpelier flipped from mixed precipitation to snow between noon and 1 p.m. for instance).

An ice glazed bush gets a frosting of snow this 
morning in St. Albans, Vermont. 

The snow will be tapering off to very light stuff or flurries as the afternoon wears on.  

All that ice and snow on the roads will remain there for awhile, since freezing rain and sleet is so hard to clear. Especially with temperatures dropping the way they are. 

If you drove to work this morning, it'll probably be a lousy trip back home, too. Especially in central and northern Vermont. 

Daytime temperatures are now by the lowest they've been since the big cold snap on February 3 and 4.  It's gotten into the teens in the northwest corner of Vermont and those teens should slowly spread south and east through the afternoon. 

It's windy out there, too, with many places gusting to 30 mph or more. That's bringing wind chills into the single numbers. So bundle up when you go out there to hack the ice off your car.