Tis The Season For Winter/Summer Hybrid (Thundery??) Weather In Vermont

Blue skies made a welcome appearance over my St.
Albans, Vermont gardens this morning. But the
sunshine that accompanies the breaks in the 
clouds will lead to scatters showers and rumbles
of thunder this afternoon and evening.

 In the winter, when a pool of cold air settles in aloft, thousands of feet above us, we get the drudgery we see in the depths of the cold season.   

In means overcast skies, cold weather, wind chills, snow showers and just general ick. 

Now that we're well into spring, we can still get those cold pools of air high overhead. Sure, when that happens in the spring, it gets chilly. But we also get hints of summer. 

Goodbye, thick overcast. Hello to scattered showers, even thunderstorms, and if you're "lucky," small hail. That's what we seem destined to see today.

The strong spring sunshine can cut through the clouds, allowing for breaks of sun to develop. That sun heats the ground pretty quickly. Then we get updrafts, which create those tall billowy clouds that we often see in the summer. 

Those tall clouds turn into showers, occasionally accompanied by a rumble of thunder or two.

Billowing shower clouds rise over my St. Albans,
Vermont gardens back in April, 2021 in a 
weather pattern that's very much similar to today's.

The dense fog that was around early this morning was burning off by 8 a.m. or so in much of the region. That was revealing areas of blue skies. 

The sun will heat the ground, and we'll see some of those tall clouds. 

These cold pools of air aloft are really storm systems in higher levels of the atmosphere. Little disturbances, which are basically mini-cold fronts, come through from time to time under these weather patterns.

It these mini-cold fronts are timed right, they can help develop these showers and storms. That will probably happen today as well. 

As we expect in the summer, the showers and isolated rumbles of thunder will be hit and miss. Some places might miss out entirely. Most of us probably won't even hear thunder. 

Unlike what we often see in the summer, today's storms and showers will not be severe. 

The few places that get bullseyed by the strongest of today's storms might hear a couple rumbles of thunder, experience a brief downpour, possibly mixed with a few pea-sized hail stones and wind gusts in the 20 to 30 mph range. Fun for weather geeks, but definitely nothing to panic over.

It'll sort of be rinse and repeat tomorrow, though the showers won't be as numerous during the day as they will today. They'll also be weaker and stand little chance of producing thunder or brief downpours.