Vermont Week Ahead: Yet More "Flurried To Death" Weather, With Some Twists

 Vermont - at least the northern half - has seemingly constantly snowed this month. 

This National Weather  Service snow prediction map
looks very much like the ones you saw last week.
This new prediction tells us the northern Green
Mountains will get a bunch of additional snow,
while southeastern Vermont misses out again. 

Every day, some snow fell somewhere in the Green Mountain State. Most of the time, not much snow falls on any one day, with the exception of some good dumps in the northern mountains here and there. 

Even in the Champlain Valley, measurable snow has fallen in Burlington on seven of the first 11 days of the month. 

It hasn't been much, as snowfall for the month so far is only a couple inches above average. Snowfall for the entire winter so far is still a good six inches on the light side in Burlington. 

Near the summit of Mount Mansfield, the snow depth has reached 46 inches, which is a little more than the 38 inches that is average for this date at the snow stake. In mid to low elevations, snow depth is up to 17 inches in towns like Westfield and Greensboro. 

In what has been mostly snow-free low elevations in southern Vermont, there's finally a dusting to an inch on the ground. 

MORE SNOW

This flurried to death regime in Vermont will continue all week. There are a few twists and turns to this however, that will make things at times just slightly different than last week. 

Today: An exception to the daily snow rule. Flurries will be hard to come by and at least some sunshine will brighten our Sunday. It'll be a bit warmer than it has been too, with highs well into the 20s, maybe near 30 in the warm spots on southern valleys. That's about normal for this time of year.

Monday/Monday Night: The snow will be back. At least for some of us.  Ahead of a cold front of sorts, it will be fairly mild with many of us reaching the low 30s. But the air will be cooling aloft, which sets us up for some sort of convective snow showers. 

It'll be similar to those hit and miss showers and thunderstorms we get in the summer. Instead of thundershowers, we'll have scattered snow showers. A few, especially later Monday and Monday night, could turn into snow squalls. 

Only some of us will get those. The squalls might lay down a quick one to three inches where they hit, and also reduce visibility and quickly mess with road conditions. 

Forecast precipitation map for Tuesday into 
Wednesday for the United States. You usually
see lots of blues and purples, indicated heavy
rain or snow. But the nation will be remarkably
dry this week, with the only real precipitation
is snow around the Great Lakes and n
in northern New England. 

Tuesday-Wednesday: We'll be back to the same regime we had last week. Persistent snow showers will cover northern Vermont. 

Once again, valleys will only see a couple, maybe a few inches of snow. The  northern Green Mountains will once again see several inches to locally as much as a foot of snow midweek. 

Southeastern Vermont, particularly the lower Connecticut River Valley, will miss out again 

Vermont, and areas around the Great Lakes where there will be torrential lake effect snows, will be the "wettest"  part of the nation midweek.

 Here in Vermont, if you melt down the snow we're forecast to receive, southern Vermont would get less than a tenth of an inch of liquid equivalent, while some northern areas could see more than a quarter inch of "rain equivalent."

Usually this time of year, storms, especially on the West Coast and in the South, often produce heavy precipitation.

There is strangely nothing going on midweek. The whole nation will be dry, which is odd to see in January, But that will change at the end of the week. 

Then things change radically.

Late Week/Next Weekend

The end of the week and next weekend is looking the most interesting, for us here in Vermont and for most of the United States as a whole.

In about six or seven days from now,   it's beginning to look like a really, really nasty Arctic outbreak is going to plunge south from near the North Pole and seriously chill the eastern half of the U.S. 

It's a little early to know how intense this cold snap will be, but it's looking like one of the more intense ones in recent years. 

At first, the bitter air will attack from Canada via the northern Plains, which would turn the wind flow southerly up the East Coast.

That means the snow ahead of the next cold front coming through here could mix with or change to rain for a time around here in Vermont. Too soon to tell for sure, but it's possible. Which would be a bit of a bummer, but you have to expect that from time to time. 

It then looks like that frigid air will spill into northern New England.  Again, too soon to tell, but it's possible we could be looking at well below zero temperatures about seven to 10 days from now.

It's turning into a longer winter than we've seen in recent years