Monday Morning Vermont Storm Update: Horrible Winds Lots Of Blowing Snow, Frigid

Digging out continues at my house in St. Albans,
Vermont and it will go on for quite awhile yet.
We had 14 inches of new snow with the weekend
storm, bringing the depth on the ground
to around two feet. No place left to put the snow
so I'm glad it stopped falling. 

 The bulk of the snow is finally over after parts of northern Vermont got buried on Sunday. 

Now the cleanup, with is going to be made really difficult by a lot of wind today. And frigid temperatures. 

The wind is the worst part. 

The departing storm is powerful. So is huge, Arctic high pressure well to our west and northwest. We're in the squeeze play between the two of those, and the result will be a terribly windy day. 

Power outages, huge snow drifts and blinding blowing snow in spots will make this perhaps a more trying weather day than Sunday was. 

THE WIND

There was already one big gush of wind in some areas overnight when the first blast of chilly air behind the storm came in.  There was an unofficial report of a gust to 76 in Whitingham.  People in Rutland estimated gusts to at least 50 mph. 

The wind will get worse today. Or at least more widespread. 

High wind warnings in Vermont continue in Bennington, Windham, Windsor and eastern Rutland counties for gusts in the 60 to 65 mph range  Most of eastern New York - and much of the Northeast for that matter - is also under high wind warnings today.

We've already seen a gust to 56 mph this morning in Mendon.

For the rest of Vermont, the wind won't quite make high wind warning criteria, but it will be close. Many of us will see gusts in the 50 to 55 mph  range.

The wind hadn't reached peak strength as of early morning. I saw a lot of reports of gusts in the 30 to 35 range around dawn. 

Map showing expected strongest wind gusts today.
Red areas are 60 mph or more. It's rare to see gusts
in the 45 to 55 mph range predicted in such a wide area 

As the atmosphere mixes better this afternoon, stronger gusts will be brought down from a couple or few thousand feet overhead, and that's when we'll see the strongest gusts. 

Eastern slopes of the Green Mountains might have it the worst, but we'll feel it everywhere. 

Outages

The main result from all this wind will be power outages. After escaping much in the way of downed power lines on Sunday, we've run out of luck.

 As of 8 a.m.  about 1,500 Vermont homes and businesses were without power, almost all of them in southern Vermont.  

The wind was a bit stronger there, and ice is also coating the trees a little, so that makes things more vulnerable. 

I have a feeling we'll see an increase in outages today as winds increase.

SNOW

We won't have much in the way of new snow today, with a dusting in the valleys and a few inches in the northern and central Green Mountains. And parts of the Northeast Kingdom. Those areas are still under a winter weather advisory for two to five inches of new snow today. 

Good luck measuring the snow with all this wind.  Which brings us to the snow that's already on the ground. The winds will blow is around mercilessly, especially in northern Vermont where the snow is especially deep and powdery. 

If you're driving in open areas away from the trees, you might run into ground blizzards, That's when there's really no snow falling, but the blowing snow is so thick you can't see in front of you. 

This can be dangerous because one second everything's fine, and the next you can't see anything because of the blowing snow. 

Traffic cam grab from Route 2 in Alburgh this morning
showing snow blowing across the road. If you look
carefully you can barely see a car amidst 
the snow blowing across the road 

Drifts will be a huge problem, too. As I mentioned yesterday, north/south oriented roads in particular will drift in quickly. A plow might come through to remove the drifts, and within an hour, you might have drifts several feet deep back on the road. 

Given the at the cleanup for yesterday's storm is still ongoing and the snow is blowing around, I'm seeing some school closures in Vermont today and a TON of delayed openings. Check your local listings. 

The wind will continue tonight, and to some extent on Tuesday, so expect blowing and drifting snow to last awhile. 

THE COLD

You'll be lucky to see temperatures rise out of the low teens today which is bad enough. But the strong gusts  will make the wind chill ridiculous. The National Weather Service in South Burlington has issued a cold weather advisory for north central and northeast Vermont. Wind chills there should get down as low as 25 below, so you don't want to mess with that. 

Another cold weather advisory goes into effect tonight in far southern Vermont. 

Those of you lucky enough not to be in an official cold weather alert shouldn't relax.  Wind chills across the state will be in the teens below zero today and tonight. That doesn't quite meet the advisory criteria, but it comes close. 

It'll stay quite cold for a couple more days after today.  Highs Tuesday and Wednesday will be in the teens to around 20, with lows with a few degrees either side of zero.

A slow warming trend will start to kick in Thursday and last through the weekend and probably into next week. Highs in the low 20s Thursday should creep up to near 30 by Sunday. 

That's not exactly warm for late February, but better. 

SOME STATS

The biggest dump of snow I've seen so far in Vermont is 15 inches in Fletcher and Northfield, followed by a handful of 14 inch reports in places like Johnson, Hyde Park and Greensboro. 

Also St, Albans, I ended up with a final total of 14 inches in my yard . There was at least a foot of snow in the ground here before this one started, so the snow is deeper than I've seen in years,

Some places in the Northeast Kingdom now have more than three feet of snow on the ground. 

After a slow start to winter snows, Burlington is now at least temporarily ahead of normal for snowfall this winter.

Burlington collected 11.6 inches of snow from this storm. That brings the total so far this season to 60.9 inches, which is a good three inches above normal for this point in the season. 

Snowfall in Burlington for the month of February so far is 29.7 inches. If no more snow falls in Burlington this month, that will still put February, 2025 in a tie for ninth snowiest February on record. 

Burlington has now had a wee bit more snow this winter than all of last season from October through April, 2024.

If you're in the mood to break all time records, though, you're out of luck. Very little snow is in the forecast for Burlington for the next week, and possibly for the rest of the month.