Sunday In Vermont: Snow Squalls Are Today's Hazard, But Unlike Rest Of U.S. Wet Get Break From Extreme Weather

A snow squall approaching St. Albans, Vermont in
February 2022 looked like a wall of snow
approaching. Similar scenes are possibly today
in parts of Vermont. 

 In the "It's always something" department, Vermont has one more hazardous day to get through today with the weather. 

The danger today will be out on the roads.

One cold front has come through. It's breezy and chillier, with snow showers around. Nothing wild .A second cold front is coming through Vermont today, and that looks like it has enough oomph to set off some snow squalls. 

Snow squall warnings were already in effect for parts of Pennsylvania this morning. 

There's a decent chance parts of Vermont might go under such warnings late this morning and afternoon. The snow squalls can be quite powerful. There's a low but not zero chance that some of the squalls today could create lightning and relatively rare thundersnow in parts of the Green Mountain State.

Snow squalls are dangerous because they abruptly turn visibility on the roads from just fine to zero. Road conditions also go from just fine to awful. That's a recipe for highway crashes. Some of the worst pileups on U.S. Interstate highways have been in snow squalls. 

If you're out driving today and go you hear a snow squall warning, and if you can, just find a way to get off the Interstate or busy highway and wait it out. Snow squalls rarely last longer than a half hour. Of course the roads will be iffy after the squall passes, but at least you won't be driving blind.

Or better yet, just stay home today. 

A February, 2022 snow squall in St. Albans,
Vermont cuts visibility to near zero. About 20 seconds
before this photo was taken, visibility was fine,
showing how quickly snow squalls can change things.

These squalls won't cause a huge amount of accumulation - probably a half inch to three inches at most. 

Another interesting thing going on this morning is that one of those lake effect snow bands coming off Lake Ontario is so powerful that it made it all the way into far northern Vermont and to the southeastern corner of Quebec.

Here in St. Albans, I caught the edge of it briefly and got one inch of snow. The snow band has since moved north. 

EXTREME WEATHER

That powerful snow squall from Lake Ontario I mentioned is part of a continuation of the extreme weather much of the United States s either dealing with or picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

Vermont is more in the picking up the pieces mode than bracing for extreme weather. The real bad stuff appears like it wants to give Vermont a break for awhile. 

As of 8:30 a.m. Sunday, about 3,000 homes and businesses were without power in Vermont, mostly in Rutland County.  Perhaps the most dramatic instance of damage yesterday came in Richmond, where the metal roof of a house blew off.

Neighbors swarmed the house during the day and pretty much replaced it by nightfall for the elderly woman living there, WPTZ reported. 

Video of the strong winds near Richmond, Vermont is at the bottom of this post.

Although today will be gusty, we won't have any winds strong enough to cause further damage. 

Saturday's storm was far more destructive in New Hampshire and Maine. Serious flooding hit Hampton Beach, New Hampshire for the second time in a week, and structures were destroyed by pounding waves and high tides in Maine. 

Blasts of Arctic air - belatedly the first real cold outbreak of the winter - is causing the continued extreme conditions this week. But not really here in Vermont

The frigid air is taking what the I, and the National Weather Service office in South Burlington call the "scenic route."  

Radar from the National Weather Service office
in South Burlington this morning shows a lake
effect snow band extending all the way from
Lake Ontario across northwest Vermont and 
southern Quebec.

It plunged southward into Montana and North Dakota, and kept going south and east, freezing the southern United States - or is about to.  

One cold blast has already hit, dropping temperatures into the 40s below zero in Montana and siccing a blizzard in the Midwest. 

Then that cold air heads northeastward from the Midwest towards us. This indirect route gives the Arctic air a chance to warm up a little bit. By the time it gets here, we end up being kinda cold, but not OH MY GOD awful.

This arrangement is also helping to create strong west to southwest winds off of Lakes Erie and Ontario, which is why western New York is getting slammed by those lake effect storms. 

The path of the cold air seems to want to suppress storms to our south this week. One on Tuesday will go out to sea well south of Vermont, but a separate system will give us light snow that day.

Another storm Friday could hit us, but early indications are that one, too will go out to sea.

Meanwhile, those storms will unleash cold, snow and ice on parts of the South this week. 

Back here in Vermont, the coldest weather looks like it will arrive by next weekend, and we might see our first subzero cold on the winter. A very late start to that idea.

The cold across the nation looks like it will be rather short-lived, too.  A warmup is about to start in the Rockies, and that should slowly move eastward across the U.S. reaching us here in New England in perhaps seven or eight days. 

VIDEO

Strong winds sweep through the Jonesville section of Richmond, Vermont Saturday.  The downslope winds can erode clouds near the mountain slopes where they originate. It happened during this storm, creating a rainbow amid the chaos. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that.