Springtime Means Snow Melts Fast In Vermont

 Well, that was quick.

My St. Albans, Vermont yard, late afternoon this
past Monday........

For most areas of Vermont, all that snow we saw this past Saturday is done already. Or at least greatly diminished.  

Here in St. Albans, which only saw six inches of snow Saturday, it was completely gone by early Wednesday afternoon. 

You can find a lingering snowbank here and there where plows shoved the accumulation into piles, but that's it.

Most other places in Vermont had just patches of snow left.  In general, four to 12 inches of snow remained Wednesday in places hardest hit by Saturday's storm. High elevations, where it's colder, are hanging on to more snow. 

I'm impressed by how much the snow compacted and partly melted in spots where the snow was deepest. Both West Windsor and Shrewsbury received more than 30 inches of snow Saturday, but in both towns, the snow depth on the ground Wednesday was just 12 inches, according to data from the National Weather Service in South Burlington. 

The high sun angle of March really helped to erode the snow, too.  Bright sunshine Sunday and Monday really chewed up the snow.  Some of it evaporated into the dry air instead of running off because the humidity was so low.

Some weather stations in Vermont calculated the water equivalent of the snow remaining on the ground. Due to a lack of heavy rains the meltdown has been orderly, with no flooding 

......same exact view less than 48 hours later. That snow
disappeared FAST! 

West Rutland had something like 20 inches of snow Saturday. If you melted it down that day, you'd have something like a little  under two inches of rain. By Wednesday, the remaining snow on the ground there contained just 0.9 inches of water. 

Vermont is having a close miss today that could have led to flooding had the weather pattern shifted just a bit. 

Another in a series of soggy storms is making its way through eastern New England today. 

A flood watch is up today for Rhode Island, the eastern  half of Massachusetts, the southeastern half of New Hampshire and most of Maine due to this heavy rain.

Some of that rain is venturing into mostly southeastern Vermont today, but it won't be heavy enough to cause any real issues there.

Just because the snow is gone, or rapidly disappearing in Vermont right now doesn't mean we're completely done with it. 

Some sort of possibly substantial storm seems like it wants to arrive this coming Tuesday or Wednesday. It's way too soon if that one will be mostly rain, or whether some of us see accumulating snow. 

We'll know more by Sunday.  Just note in all my years in Vermont, I can't recall any April where didn't snow in Vermont. In a few Aprils, like in 1974, 1975, 1983, 2000, even many low elevations had more than a foot of snow.