National Weather Service Burlington Had Amazingly Accurate Vermont Snow Forecast

Here's the forecast snow map issued by the 
National Weather Service office in South Burlington
Thursday morning...

 The final numbers are pretty much all in from Vermonts nice Thanksgiving snowfall, and it's time to assess the forecasters.  

Namely, the National Weather Service in South Burlington. 

For this event, they get a very solid A, with bonus points for winning a tricky forecast. 

First map you see on this post is snowfall they were predicting as of early Thursday morning. The second map shows what actually happened.

As you can see, they're pretty much the same map. The National Weather Service nailed where the heaviest snow would fall, and where it would be lightest.

 They got exactly right the northward extent of the heaviest snow, and which parts of the state got pretty much nothing. 

The only thing "wrong" is in the areas that received the heaviest snowfall. The National Weather Service underestimated some of the highest totals in southern and eastern Vermont.  We seem to have a pattern of storms.

And this is the map showing actual snow totals from
Thursday. The two maps are practically the same.

Snowstorms when the temperature is close to the freezing point are notoriously hard to predict. Predicted temperatures on any given day are very often a couple degrees off from what actually happens. 

If you forecast rain and 50 degrees and it ends up being 53 degrees during the rainfall, people really aren't going to notice the difference. 

But if you think a spot is going to hover at 35 degrees with rain, and it ends up being 32 degrees with several inches of snow, that comes off as a real forecast bust.

So not only did the National Weather Service have to figure out where the heaviest precipitation would set up - which is a big trick in and of itself -  they had to determine how temperatures would behave at all the different elevations Vermont has.

Kudos to NWS Burlington. They've gotten the winter forecasting season off to a rousing start.