Tuesday Morning Vermont Forecast. Mid, Late Week Return To Winter Forecast Becoming More Clear

The National Weather Service in South Burlington is taking
a first crack at snowfall amounts Wednesday night
and early Thursday. If this holds true, northwest 
Vermont could see two to five inches, with 
much less Southeast. 

 It's another rather mild morning in Vermont for January, as most of us started the day at around 30 degrees. Not exactly beach weather, but we'll take it. 

Burlington has been continuous just barely above freezing since 1 p.m. yesterday, bouncing between 33 and 34 degrees.  

The city should remain above freezing until Wednesday evening, so it's a pretty long stretch for January. 

Yesterday, the forecast was a mess, with a lot of questions as to what would happen in New England toward the end of this week. Would there be a nor'easter, or something other dreadful thing coming through?

We now have more clarity as to what kind of weather will come through at the end of the week. So us weather geeks are looking a bit less like morons now.  

We'll take you through it: 

Right now, we're on the warm side of a deep, narrow southward dip in the jet stream that's forming in the eastern United States and southeast Canada.  A strong south flow of air will keep us mild, but not extraordinarily so until Wednesday night. 

We won't be setting record high temperatures, but we will be much warmer than normal until then. Highs today and tomorrow will be in the 35 to 42 degree range in most of Vermont. 

South winds will increase, especially in the Champlain Valley. By tonight, gusts there will once again go to or a little over 40 mph. So it will feel a little chillier than your thermometer might indicate. It's a classic case of the Champlain Valley "warming up cold." 

OUR STORM

The cold front with this jet stream dip will approach tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, a modest to mid-sized storm will form along that cold front. If this morning's forecasts hold, that storm will head northward right over Vermont as the cold front comes through Wednesday night. 

This is going to be kind of a mess. It'll start out as rain, then switch to snow, going from northwest to southeast overnight. The combination of that rainwater freezing, a wet snow freezing, too, and drier snow on top of that will make things quite slick on the roads by Thursday morning. 

I'm guessing the National Weather Service will put up some winter weather advisories as we get closer to Wednesday night. 

The snow will be tapering off Thursday morning, but the damage will have been done. I'd start planning now to work at home Thursday or at least plan on extra time getting to work or school. 

At this point, snow accumulations don't look all that impressive. The northwestern half of Vermont looks like they're in for two to five inches of snow. .

That would taper off to less than an inch in the southeast corner of the state. 

By the way, if a nor'easter does manage to form out of this weather pattern, it would get going far offshore and bother Atlantic Canada, not New England. 

WINTER RETURNS

We'll definitely see a return to winter, but this first in a series of cold waves won't be anything to complain about too much. Thursday and Thursday night will be the worst of it, with cold northwest winds.

Temperatures should fall through the teens during the day Thursday and drop to the single numbers. It'll warm up a little over the weekend, but not much. 

The long range models continue to insist on repeated blasts of frigid air through the rest of the month, each one worse than the previous, through the end of the month. There might be brief squirts of milder air between each cold outbreak, but it'll be a bundle up kind of regime. 

The American computer model has us getting almost as cold as it can possibly get toward the end of the month. This model, when it looks more than a week into the future, often exaggerates the strength of winter cold waves, though. 

That said, the European model has northern New England getting into the 20s below by around the 27th of January, give or take. 

I wouldn't take these bone chilling extended forecasts as gospel just yet. But you might want to keep your warmest parkas within arm's reach just in case.