"Backwards" Showers Complicate Vermont Mother's Day; Wetter Spell Ensues

Today's the third day in a row we're contending with "backwards" showers here in Vermont.

Shower clouds fighting with the sun over St. Albans,
Vermont Saturday. That's the pattern we've had all
month. It's the pattern we'll see on Mother's Day today,
and also what we'll see in much of the upcoming week.

They're moving generally east to west, instead of the usual opposite direction. Upper level low pressure kind of near Buffalo is pulling those showers westward.  

Like in past days, the closer you are to that sort of storm near Buffalo, the more likely it is to rain. 

Which is why Adirondacks have been wet the past few days, western Vermont has had hit and miss showers, and folks east of the Greens have been mostly dry. 

The upper low near Buffalo meant business: It spun off a tornado that struck a church occupied by 60 people in Finleyville, a town in western Pennsylvania. Only minor injuries were reported.  By the way, absolutely we'll see absolutely no severe weather from this thing here in Vermont. 

At least a lot of us had a clearing interval for that northern lights display Friday night, right?

MOTHERS DAY

You'll be dodging rain drops today. The showers are more numerous than they were the previous couple of days. 

Not everyone will get wet - they're still hit and miss - but there probably will be more hits than misses. Especially west of the Greens.

Some of you who get wet will get very wet. The showers are just inching along westward. I swear the most lethargic turtle in the world can outpace them.  If you get caught under a shower, it might last a good hour in spots.

The bottom line is, the rainiest places could get more than a half inch of rain, while places a dozen or fewer miles up the road from those soggy spots might end up staying dry. 

According to some climatology provided by the National Weather Service office in South Burlington, Mother's Day weather is usually on the iffy side for us.  A "normal" Vermont Mother's Day features highs in the 60s, lows in the 40s with at least a trace of rain on 60 percent of those days. 

Which means this year's iteration of Mother's Day is pretty typical. 

The National Weather Service notes that at least a trace of snow has fallen on five Mother's Days since 1914, the most recent being in 2020.

I'm happy to report it will NOT snow anywhere in Vermont today. 

LOOKING AHEAD

We'll revert back to the more general west to east flow of weather starting tomorrow.  The storm in the eastern Great Lakes will fade, replaced by a new system coming in from the west.  It'll push a sort of warm front through Monday night with some showers and maybe a rumble of thunder.

We're almost guaranteed some rain in at least parts of Vermont Tuesday, but I'm not sure if there will be a lot or a little. Some computer models push things through slowly, and allow a little warmth and humidity to build up.  If that happens, it would be far from oppressively warm, but we'd have lots of showers and scattered thunderstorms. There would be some heavy downpours. 

However, if things zip right on through, as some models indicate, it won't rain all that much. Stay tuned.

All month so far, we've been in a pattern that features lots of weak systems coming through with frequent but generally not dramatic showers, and temperatures that have been more or less close to normal for the season. 

That pattern looks like it will continue for the foreseeable future. It's hard to time out when the showers will come through and how heavy they might be over the next week or two. But we'll keep dodging raindrops here and there. 

And avoiding an early introduction to summer heat, something we've had in most springs in recent years.