Vermont Rain Struggling Against Dry Air Today During An Oddly Extreme-Free Spell Of Weather

 If you looked at weather radar overnight and early this  morning, you'd think it was about to rain any minute. 

This batch of daffodils in my St. Albans, Vermont gardens
seem happy enough with weather that has lacked
extremes over the past week to 10 days. So far, at 
least, the weather forecast looks mellow
for the next several days. 

But the rain kept disappearing by the time it approached the Vermont border. Were we in some kind of force field?

Kinda. 

The force field was just very low humidity. 

Dry air stubbornly held on overnight in Vermont, making any inroads the rain tried to make fail. It's the type of super dry air I talked about in yesterday morning's post.  When rain tries to invade, it often evaporates into that arid atmosphere. 

The rain was finally slowly edging into the Green Mountain State as of 7:45 this morning, but it's going to take its time. 

For instance, radar had the rain just to the southwest of my perch in St; Albans, Vermont for a couple hours previous to 7:45 a.m. I could see the rain from my house in the Adirondacks, but it only seems to advance toward me at a crawl.  It took another 45 minutes to just travel roughly ten miles to the point it started sprinkling at my place. 

The rain is moistening the atmosphere, so it will be able to advance across pretty much all of Vermont. But that dry air means it will only grudgingly advance across the state.  By the time it reaches the Northeast Kingdom later today, the weak system causing the rain will have exhausted most of its moisture supply. 

Rainfall will be light, amounting to as much as a quarter inch across western Vermont to only a few hundredths of an inch in the Northeast Kingdom. 

COOL DAY

April can be very temperamental. An example is this
blinding snow squall on April 22, 2021, which was
the second of two very snowy days in an
otherwise warm April that year. 

The light rain will keep the air cool today, holding in the 40s.  In the Champlain Valley, where temperatures sneaked to a little above 50 degrees early this morning, the light rain will chill us back into the 40s.  

Mild weather has been persistent this month.  Starting April 7, each day in Burlington has reached 50 and above.  The forecast calls for temperatures to reach at least 50 degrees for each of the next 7 days. 

Most days have been pretty close to normal, but it's been odd not to have a few chillier days thrown in with highs in 40s or only 30s.

 The only other April I can think of that had no such nippy days after the first week or so of the month was last year. 

For the record, the lowest high temperature on record for this date was 35 degrees in 1926.

I'm sure we'll eventually have a couple more truly chilly days before summer. (Remember last year we had a hard freeze on the 18th, and May 17 of last year featured highs in the 40s with snow flurries).

April is usually a pretty temperamental month in Vermont. Summery warm spells are followed by snowstorms. Warm sun and bone chilling winds can come on the same day, or within the same hour. 

This April has been oddly steady as she goes, at least after we got over that big ugly snowstorm on the fourth and fifth of this month.  And the forecast calls for continued moderation. 

It's as if April has stopped boozing and sobered up for a change. But don't worry, I fully expect our Vermont spring to go on another big bender sooner or later.