Current Cold Snap Hits Right On Schedule In Vermont

A cold winter morning pictured in Burlington, Vermont
several years ago. The cold snap we're having now comes
during what is normally the chilliest point of the winter.

 It finally got below 10 degrees in Burlington, Vermont yesterday, the first time this winter. 

From everything I can tell, that's by far the latest first single digit reading of the season of any winter in Burlington. The closest I could find to this year's first 10 is on January 4, 2016.  

We have a couple more days of single digit cold to come as we are in that northerly flow of air from Canada - something that's been a real rarity this winter.

Today will be the roughest day of the cold spell, although this isn't extreme by Vermont standards. 

Temperatures will hold in the single numbers and teens all day. An area of light snow coming down from Canada will coat us with perhaps a dusting to a little over an inch of snow in all but the southeastern corner of Vermont.

The northern Green Mountains are in for a two or three inches of new snow, as it looks now.

A major word of caution here: The snow we're getting today is obviously not much. But it's cold out there and road salt doesn't work well. In my experience, when it snows in weather like today, car tires compress a little bit of the snow into a very thin layer of black ice.

The Interstate and highways look basically dry in this weather, but they are deceptively slippery. You need to slow down some. And watch for the yahoos out there who insist of driving 90 mph on bald tires. They figure if they can't see the ice, it isn't there. 

Until they crash into the rocks, or into you.

Sigh. 

The snow will come to an end tonight, and we might even see a little sun tomorrow. It will stay cold, with lows on either side of zero tonight and tomorrow night and highs in the teens Sunday.

The Champlain Valley might well avoid going below zero in this current cold snap. Which means the first subzero reading of the season will also be much later than normal. Not record late, but tardy for sure. 

That promised warm up will start in earnest Monday and it will be decidedly warmer than average next week. We might have a little snow and, um, yeah, rain mixed it at times, but no huge storms. 

COLDEST PART OF WINTER

This belated sort of run of the mill winter cold wave did hit on schedule, though. Right now is - on average - the coldest point of the winter. 

Much of the northern hemisphere, including Vermont, continues to get colder and colder for a good month after the December winter solstice.

While sunshine slowly begins to increase as we go through January, it's not enough to prevent the dark Arctic from getting colder and colder and colder and then occasionally releasing that chill southward into populated areas of North America, Europe and Asia. 

But there's hope starting sort of soon, if you don't like winter cold. The sun is slowly creeping north in the Arctic. The sun will rise in Utquigvik, formerly Barrow on the northern tip of Alaska this coming Tuesday for the first time since November 18 .

This slow march toward spring will take awhile. As we well know, big subzero Arctic blasts can hit us in Vermont well into March .

Big cold spells can occur at anytime from mid-March into spring, so the coldest weather of the winter doesn't always hit around this time of year. But the chances are greatest now. The lowest "normal" temperatures of the year in Burlington run from January 17-29, when the average is 20 degrees, according to current climate information. 

Normal temperature only very, very slowly climb through most of February, before increasing at a pace of very roughly half a degree per day starting in late February and continuing through the spring.

Since the current cold wave is so lame, chances are we will have an even colder spell of weather later this winter.