Snow Continues To Pile Up In Vermont Mountains, Strong Rain/SnowStorm Midweek?

Snowfalls in the past week has our property in St. Albans
looking suddenly wintry and Christmasy. Two more inches
overnight into early this Saturday morning. 

 The mountains of Vermont and the rest of northern New England continue to be blessed by frequent snowfalls, with the latest installment overnight and early this morning depositing an extra few inches of fluff on the ski areas.  

For a change the snow finally extended into the Champlain Valley instead of limiting itself to the mid and high elevations of Vermont.

 Burlington looks like it received a couple of inches of snow, the first time this season they managed to get more than a very thin dusting. The average date of the first inch in Burlington is November 17, so they're about three weeks late.

The snow will taper off this morning only to return tonight. 

That's because another in a string of little "clipper" storms is due to come in from the west and northwest.  This one will be stronger than this morning's but not nearly as robust as the one that came through Wednesday and Thursday. 

The wind field with this new one tonight will once again limit snowfall in the Champlain Valley and lower Connecticut River Valley, so they'll get less than two inches. Maybe just a dusting. But the National Weather Service office in South Burlington tells us most of the rest of Vermont can expect another one to four inches, with maybe a good six inches up at the ski resorts, especially from Killington north. 

After that, things get interesting for the upcoming week, and not necessarily in a good way. 

STORMINESS

A rather stormy pattern is about to take hold for much of the upcoming week, but the details on what might happen are still murky. But there's the potential for pretty heavy precipitation of some sort midweek.  

In this screen grab from the WCAX Echo Cam on
Burlington waterfront the city clearly finally managed
to receive the first snowfall of the season to exceed an inch

In fact, in their forecast discussion this morning, the National Weather Service in South Burlington suggested that if Wednesday's storm takes the form of mostly rain, it could cause some local flooding as the rain won't soak into areas with froze ground, and would combine with snowmelt for excess runoff.

This despite a drought gripping much of the state.  It would just be too rain too fast if that pessimistic forecast for midweek comes to pass.  

 Remember,  that scenario is still a vague maybe, and we're also getting ahead of ourselves.

The pattern is shifting, so that instead of chilly weather systems coming in from the west and northwest, warmer ones will start coming at us from the south. 

The first of these fresh disturbances in our active pattern will first have to come in Monday and Tuesday. It'll take the form of a relatively weak  low pressure coming at us from the southwest to throw should some light snow, and worse, maybe some freezing rain at us Monday and Monday night.

Then, a front will stall somewhere in the East, and another wave, or waves of low pressure are forecast to move northward along it. These waves will have boatloads of moisture to work with, but there's a couple key ingredients we haven't figured out yet.

One, where will the deepest moisture set up? Right now, that looks like eastern New England, but even so, the storminess could still have plenty of moisture to work with in Vermont. And besides, this moisture scenario could change one way or another as forecasts get refined as we get closer to midweek.

So the potential is there for a lot of.......something. 

Will it rain or snow or both?  It depends on where those low pressure waves track. The further west they go, the more rain we get. The further east, the more likely it will be snow.

Initial guesses give Vermont a rain changing to snow kind of thing. But will it be lots of rain, then a little snow or a little rain then lots of snow? Will one part of Vermont get much more rain or much more snow than other parts of the region?

Stay tuned for a future episode of "As The Weather Turns" for those answers to be revealed. In other words, we need updated forecasts and changes as we draw closer to the actual event.  

For now, be prepared for some potentially nasty weather in the upcoming week. We'll keep an eye on it!