Satellite Photo Shows Vermont Snow Melt Progress

Visible satellite view of Vermont on Wednesday shows
many valley areas have lost their snow. Some interesting
areas in there, too. Click on the photo to make it 
bigger and easier to pick out details. 

 I came across an interesting visible satellite photo on the Burlington National Weather Service office web page yesterday, before the clouds rolled in. 

It gave a very clear view of how the snow has melted out of the Champlain Valley, and some of the lowlands in the Connecticut River Valley. 

The photo is in this post. Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to pick details out. 

One thing I noticed is the sharp line between no snow and snow in eastern Bennington, Rutland and Addison counties. 

The valley floors are virtually free of snow, but go up just a tiny bit in elevation along the western slopes of the Green Mountains, and you encounter solid snowpack. 

I noticed this as I drove through parts of Addison and Rutland counties on Sunday. Often during the spring thaw, the snow cover somewhat gradually goes from bare ground, to patchy to mostly snow to complete snow. On Sunday's trip,  I could see the abrupt change from no snow to complete snow cover,

This probably has a lot to do with the snowstorm on March 14-15. It was highly elevation dependent. The lowest elevations got modest amounts of snow, while elevations from about 900 feet and up got clobbered. That's probably part of what you see along those western slopes. 

If you also look closely, you can see the snow on the Taconic mountains in northwestern Bennington and western Rutland County. Again, you can discern the valleys. The little gap in the snow cover heading southeast to northwest in northern Bennington County and southwestern Rutland County is the Route 30 corridor in the Mettawee Valley.

By the way, that Mettawee Valley area of Route 30 is in my opinion the prettiest stretch of road in Vermont. Definitely worth a trip. 

Along another stretch of Route 30 in southeastern Vermont, you can see the snow free valley it travels heading northwest from Brattleboro, until the road encounters higher elevations and snow cover somewhere near Townshend or Jamaica. 

You can also see a gap in the snow cover in west-central Rutland County, with just a patch of snow to the north. That gap is the valley Route 4 takes toward Whitehall, New York. The small white patch to the north of Route 4 is Grandpa's Knob, and probably one or two higher peaks before the Taconics dwindle to nothing west of Brandon. 

A also think Grandpa's Knob is a wonderful name for a mountain. Or a senior citizen rock band. 

Looking much further north, if you squint your eyes,  you can sort of detect a narrow "crack" in the snow cover from far eastern Chittenden County through much of central Washington County. That's the Winooski River valley. The valley floor has little snow, but just slightly uphill from the river, you encounter a decent snow cover, 

Even further north, that patch of snow in central Franklin County just east of St. Albans is St. Albans Hill, just to the south of where I live.  My house is a third of the way up an adjacent, slightly smaller hill.  

I can attest that yesterday the bottom of the hill was snow free, my  yard still had patches of snow, and the top of the hill was almost totally snow covered. My hill is the tiny white dot north of the patch of white that is St. Albans Hill. 

You can also see that Lake Champlain is largely clear of ice, except the eastern part of the Lake from Malletts Bay in Colchester on up to St. Albans Bay.  The bays in the northern parts of the lake are usually the last to lose their ice in the spring. 

As we go through the next several weeks, on clear days, you'll see satellite images showing the snow cover retreating from both western and eastern Vermont, until only the summits of the Green Mountains.