A Damp, Flaky Vermont Forecast; Incredibly Raw Start To Week

An interlude of sunshine Saturday lit up these lingering
golden leaves in St. Albans, Vermont, but the gloom is
back and so is the chill. 

 The cold front that ended our long of warm autumn weather came through as scheduled Saturday.

It gave us a brief window in which the persistent clouds over the past two or three weeks gave way to bright blue skies during the afternoon.  

Now, this Sunday morning, we're back to the gloom we've been under, and it's a lot cooler out there. 

The cold front temporarily stalled to our south, just as expected. A couple little storms are rippling along the front, or are about to. 

Last gasps of warm air are trying to ride up and over the front and the cold air behind it, created another round of dull overcast that will last through Monday.

To add to the chilly misery, occasional rain will be the rule today through most of Monday. Some of the rain will be white - as in snow. 

The first wave of precipitation was trying to move in by 8 or 9 a.m. this Sunday morning, but dry air near the surface was drying up the rain as it fell, so it was initially not making it to the ground. The rain will be spotty north, and some places have a shot of staying generally dry, if dark and gloomy. 

Actually, the rain is probably in the form of snow way up high, near summit levels around here. It's changing to rain on the way down. But that evaporation is cooling the air further, so when the a little rain finally does make it to the ground, some people might find a few wet snowflakes mixing in. 

It would just be a few snowflakes, and mostly confined to north-central Vermont away from Lake Champlain and the Northeast Kingdom.

This one isn't much, but this is the first of I'm sure many
National Weather Service/South Burlington snow
forecast maps you'll see this winter. As you can see
higher elevations, at least are in for a little snow
now through late night Monday. 

The precipitation might wane a bit this afternoon, but really pick up and become steady overnight. 

Rain and snow will never come down particularly heavy overnight and Monday, but it will make things sopping wet again. 

Rain or melted snow will probably amount to too much - about a half inch north to a little under an inch far south in Vermont. 

 This will vault Burlington into the top ten list of wettest Octobers. We've already established it will among the top ten warmest, so yeah, this month has indeed been weird, in case you haven't noticed. 

You also see I'm mentioning snow in this outlook.   Higher and even some mid elevations, mainly above 2,000 feet or so, might expect a slushy coating to an inch of snow from this late tonight and Monday morning. Some more wet flakes might  make it to valley floors. 

There's always a chance this could over-perform, too. The National Weather Service in South Burlington has a nifty winter weather page that, among many other things, gives percent chances of different snow totals. For instance, Island Pond has a 59 percent chance of seeing 0.1 inches of snow.

There's a low chance, it things turn out right, that even the Champlain Valley gets involved. St. Albans has a 22 percent chance of at least 0.1 inches of snow, and Burlington has an 18 percent chance. Bad odds if you're a gambler, but still, interesting. 

This snow isn't weird for the very end of October, but it's a reality check for those of us who were lulled into the never ending summer the past couple of months. 

I don't see any signs of a big warmup anytime soon. There might even be some snow showers around Wednesday. We're lucky that a nor'easter that could have brought accumulating snow to us midweek is going way too far out to sea to bother us. 

It might get vaguely warmer toward the weekend, but not nearly enough to throw open the windows again. 

This type of weather pattern - very typical of November, really - tends to keep the clouds locked into place. Yeah, you'll see glimpses of sun, and maybe even some bonafide partly sunny skies at times toward Thursday and Friday.  

But for those of you with solar patterns, you still won't be making tons of electricity for yourselves anytime soon. But that's typical for this time of year.