Rain Changing To Snow Early Today In Vermont, Winter Is Back

Traffic cam of Interstate 89 in Brookfield, which is close to 
the highest elevation on the Interstate has already 
picked up a few inches of snow, making for
hazardous travel. Rain was changing to snow
in lower elevations as of 7:30, so this
mornings commute is a little iffy.

 As of 7:15 a.m., road conditions were deteriorating in northern Vermont as rain was changing to snow and temperatures were falling to and then below the freezing point. 

Rain flipped to snow shortly before 7 a.m. here in St. Albans. Places in central Vermont have already gone to snow, too. The southern and central Champlain Valley and most of southern parts of the state were still raining. 

Nobody in Vermont will get much snow out go this. Northern New York was the big winner with this. 

For Vermont, whatever snow we get is a timing problem. The changeover to snow for many of us is hitting when it's time to drive to work or school. 

As temperatures dip below freezing as the snow continues to fly, you know that means road conditions won't be great everywhere. It was still raining around Burlington as of 7 a.m., but we'll see how long tha lasts,   

It's the usual admonition to drive slowly, and leave plenty of room between you and the car in front of you.

Accidents are already happening. Police and fire trucks just blasted past my house in St. Albans as of 7:15 a.m. Apparently, there's a rollover crash just up the hill from my house. 

Where it's snowing, it will continue lightly well into today. I don't have any official snow reports yet, but judging from traffic cameras, it looks like areas well away from Lake Champlain in Vermont had picked up a dusting to an inch in low elevations in northern Vermont and maybe two or as much as three inches higher up.  

Rainy areas will be snowy soon. Additional snowfall looks like it might amount to  about one to 2,5 inches in the northwestern quarter of Vermont and less than an inch in most other places.

The Green Mountains should get a two to four inch dusting to partly make up for yesterday's thawing. 

Light snow should continue in parts of northern Vermont through the afternoon. The southern Connecticut River Valley will manage just flurries, if that.

COLDER PATTERN ARRIVES

The thaw is officially OVER. 

Six of the past seven days in Burlington got to at least 40 degrees. It's going to be quite awhile before it's 40 again. 

Later this morning and this afternoon, the real cold air will catch up to us. Temperatures were only slowly falling through the low and mid 30s in Vermont right before dawn. Over in New York, in the western Adirondacks and St. Lawrence Valley, it was already getting into the teens as of 7 a.m.

That air will soon be in Vermont to solidify the ice on the sidewalks and untreated roads. By the time you go to bed, temperatures should be in the teens for most of us, and down in the single number stop near 10 by dawn tomorrow. 

That frigid weather pattern I talked about yesterday is still on its way. Usually, the initial slap from these Arctic outbreaks is pretty tame when we get into these Nanook of the North weather regimes.

That's the case this time. Temperature will recover to the low 20s Friday, and low 30s Saturday. They'll probably settle into the mid and upper 20s Sunday and Monday afternoons. So, not bad!

Between tonight and Monday, we'll have chances of snow showers, but we won't see any big piles of snow The snow cover in the valleys will remain thin for awhile after our thaw. 

Most of next week looks pretty frigid. Early guesses put high temperatures most days from Tuesday onward at around 10 degrees, maybe 15 degrees in the warm spots, with lows near zero. Chances of snow showers will continue through the week, but prospects of a big dump of snow are looking pretty bleak for now. 

There might be a brief break in the chill next weekend before it turns really cold again.

One encouraging thing is I might have been right about some of the models backing off on how cold it will get as we get closer to the events. This is looking less and less like near record cold as we head through the rest of the month. Instead, we just face annoying cold..

That means mostly below normal temperatures, but maybe not the kind of extremes we saw back in the 1970s and even early 1990s, when we'd get into the mid 20s to mid 30s below zero.

Fingers crossed that we'll avoid that!