For Second Time In A Row, Vermont Storm Had Tricks Up Its Sleeves

Another two and a half inches or so of snow
greeted me and our vehicles this morning in
St. Albans, Vermont. The forecast for this
storm has turned out accurate for places
near the Canadian border, but for other 
places in Vermont, well........

This is the time of year when meteorologists might be tempted to give up on the science and flip a coin. 

Early spring is when you tend to get the most surprises and we have some today. As many early Sunday morning risers have already noticed. 

SUNDAY MORNING SURPRISES

Most of Vermont had little or no snow as of 8 a.m. Had forecasters been right the snow would have started two hours earlier. Snow, and some rain ended up arriving after 8 a.m.   

Despite continued forecast to the contrary, I'm doubting many places along and south of Route 2 will see as much snow as had been forecast. But who knows? We seem to be in the season of surprises. 

Meanwhile, a heavier a slug of precipitation was heading into southern Vermont. The further south you go, the warmer it is. Bennington was at 39 degrees as of 8 a.m., so I imagine they'll see mostly rain. It'll be interesting to see at what elevation you have to reach in the southern Green Mountains before it's mostly snow. 

Another big surprise was the dump of snow early this morning near the Canadian border. That snow did arrive in the hours before dawn, as forecast. From what I can tell, areas within 30 miles of the border have gotten at a few inches of snow. There was 2.6 inches of new snow at my place in St Albans as of 9 a.m.  

As of 8 a.m., the snow in St. Albans had turned to a light sleet, with perhaps a few drops of freezing rain mixed in. That's a clue to what we'll deal with this afternoon and evening. A special weather statement from the National Weather Service in South Burlington noted that most of the Champlain Valley was switching over to light freezing rain or drizzle.

When the precipitation gets a little heavier, it goes toward snow. When it gets lighter, freezing drizzle and drizzle. I noticed at around 9 a.m. drizzle changed back to a burst of snow as a zone of heavier precipitation seen on radar moved in. 

As of 9 a.m., temperatures ranged from near freezing to a degree or two above in the Champlain Valley. However, central Vermont is at risk for some freezing drizzle for a few more hours. 

So that annoying icy stuff should just turn into an annoying misty cold spray in your face this afternoon.  

But it will probably go back to freezing drizzle tonight, which will make you have a workout early tomorrow morning scraping a thin but firm coat of ice off at least some of our windshields. It will also make untreated surfaces like driveways and sidewalks icy traps that could have you tumbling to the ground. 

FORECAST BUSTS

I think this storm forecast is turning out to be more of a bust than Friday's. In Friday's storm, forecasts prior to the snow were obviously wrong in the Champlain Valley. But the forecasts for northern Vermont east of the Greens and southern Vermont were actually quite accurate. 

I'm not busting the chops of the meteorologists at the National Weather Service in South Burlington. They do an awesome job. But, these kinds of things keep happening. I continue to wonder - albeit without evidence so far - that steep National Weather Service cutbacks under the Trump administration, is compromising the data that goes into computerized forecasting. 

Bad data equals bad outcomes.

I'm not the only one who is wondering about this. As we reported recently, Michigan's governor and two U.S. Senators sent out inquiries regarding forecasts ahead of deadly tornadoes in southern Michigan earlier this month. 

 I also have to acknowledge that early spring storms have always been notoriously hard to forecast, so that is definitely one important factor in all of this.  Besides, forecasting for this storm wasn't entirely a bust. We knew yesterday the Northeast Kingdom would probably get the most snow, and that seems to be the case. 

And interestingly, in the northern Champlain Valley up by St. Albans and Highgate, it appears the forecast will come out spot on. 

We also thought southern Vermont valleys would get at least some rain and little snow and that also seems to be happening, 

LOOKING AHEAD

It's a scary prospect to forecast given what I've said above, but those meteorologists working on our behalf need to attempt it. After tonight's patchy freezing drizzle, Monday looks like a somewhat unpleasant day, but something we should be used to in March.

That means mostly cloudy skies, snow showers and a chilling north wind. Highs will only make it into the low 30s at best for most of us. Maybe upper 20s in northern hills, and perhaps upper 30s in southern valleys.

Monday night looks cold, of course, with lows in the teens to low 20s. Tuesday looks like the pick of the week with sunny skies and temperatures near 40. That's near to just a smidge cooler than average for this time of year.

Our next storm looks like it will come along Thursday. I don't dare take a stab of what will happen with Thursday's system just yet. But it will probably be a capricious one, just like Friday's storm and today's weather   

 

If Skies Stay Clear, A REALLY Cool Lunar Eclipse Early Tomorrow Morning

Get up early tomorrow morning to view the total lunar
eclipse. The moon will look red like in this photo.
It'll also be near the western horizon as the sun is 
coming up during totality. 

A lunar eclipse is going to be visible across the United States early tomorrow morning, but the eastern United States, including here in Vermont are in for a special treat. 

The lunar eclipse will happen right around sunrise. As the sun is coming up in the east, the moon will be a deep red color because of the eclipse just before it sinks below the western horizon. 

To time it out here in Vermont, the total eclipse of the moon will start at 6:04 a.m and end at 7:02 a.m. But you won't see the end of it because the moon will be below the horizon by then. 

Here's the fun part: The maximum of the eclipse is at 6:25 a.m, when the moon will be at its reddest color. Meanwhile, the sun will rise at 6:26 a.m. Burlington time. And depending on where you are in Vermont, the moon will set in the west sometime between 6:18 and 6:28 a.m 

During totality, the moon will look red like it does in most total lunar eclipses. However, the moon will be near the horizon, so you'll have that perspective. I imagine views from the Champlain Valley toward the Adirondacks while this is going on will be awesome. This is cooler than the "typical" lunar eclipse. 

The moon obviously doesn't have its own light. We see the moon shining brightly because the sun's light is blasting it. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth gets between the sun and moon, casting its shadow on the moon. 

The moon looks red during a total eclipse because the Earth's atmosphere bends sunlight and indirectly lights up the moon's surface. 

A total lunar eclipse will happen at any given location on average once every 2.5 years. 

After tomorrow, the next total lunar eclipse that will be visible from Vermont will be on June 25, 2029.

Of course, you can't see a lunar eclipse if it's cloudy. Too bad the eclipse wasn't this morning since it was crystal clear. Of course, temperatures were below zero, so you would have frozen your butt off watching it. 

As it looks now, some high clouds will be coming into Vermont at the time of the eclipse. That might not be such a bad thing. During the much more rare total eclipse of the sun in April, 2024, there were some high clouds overhead but those clouds actually enhanced the event, making it all the more fantastic.   

The high clouds might make the eclipse even more interesting than it otherwise would be. High, thin clouds tend to glow red, orange and pink at sunrise.  This could get really interesting.

The bottom line is depending on where you are in Vermont at dawn tomorrow, the eclipse might look at little milky behind the high clouds, and in other areas the high clouds will be so unsubstantial it won't interfere with the viewing at all. 

It will be cold again, however. Temperatures at that hour should be in the single numbers to low teens. Pretty chilly, but not as bad as this morning  

Climate Change CAN Worsen Winter Storms. But It's Complicated

Upper level forecast shows how cold weather
in eastern U.S will last into early Februarty.
Green lines depict the jet stream. Note how
wavy it is and how it heads southeastward
into the United States. Those red dotted
areas indicate areas of high pressure and warm
air for the region. That so much of the red
dots mean there's an Arctic amplification,
which means cold air is being squashed 
southward toward us. Scientists are 
studying whether climate change is making
weather patterns like this more likely. 

I suppose I can't blame President Trump for wondering where global warming went. 

There's massive amounts of ice and snow from New Mexico to southeast Canada. The South is locked in ice after a bunch of freezing rain. People are shivering in their homes without electricity. 

Dozens of daily record low high temperatures and record low overnight temperatures have already been set this weekend, mostly in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.  More records will fall in the next few days, mostly across the South and southeastern parts of the U.S.  

Whether this storm, or any other extreme winter event in recent years can be tied to climate change is iffy. But there are some picky scientific details that suggest the warming world can paradoxically helping create these epic winter storms and cold snaps. 

As Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli explains, climate change can during relatively brief periods enhance the cold in places like the United States.

Sometimes - and this is occurring now - blocking high pressure settles over the Arctic, especially near or over Greenland - making them warm. At least warm compared to the insane cold you should expect up there. 

This setup shoves the cold air down into places like the United States and western Europe. 

Meanwhile, the Arctic overall is warming at a pace up to four times greater than most of the rest of the world.  That's called Arctic amplification. In fact, right now it's super warm for the season in parts of Greenland. In Nuuk, on the relatively mild southwest coast of Greenland, normal highs this time of year are around 20 degrees with a low of about 12.

The Weather Channel says Nuuk will have a high temperature of 42 degrees today, and it probably won't go below freezing tonight. 

Berardelli notes that the extra warming from climate change amplifies the blocking high pressure over the Arctic or Greenland.  That, in turn even more firmly pushes the cold air toward the United States and other mid-latitude places .

The air coming down from the Arctic because of this pattern isn't any colder than it used to be. In fact it's somewhat warmer. Punches of frigid air that have always blasted into the Upper Midwest are generally a bit milder than the were a generation or two ago. 

For instance, one study by Climate Central noted that the lowest temperature of the year has increased by 12 degrees since 1970. 

But when these Arctic air masses get pulled all the way down into the southern half of the United States, big trouble ensues. Like the winter storm we're having this weekend. 

There's at least circumstantial evidence that a wavier jet stream has started to occasionally send at times unprecedented blasts of Arctic air far south, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

We had the big Texas freeze and utility collapse in 2021, the one that killed nearly 250 people. Last January, an unprecedented snowstorm swept the Gulf Coast, burying places from New Orleans to Pensacola, Florida in more than six inches of snow. New Orleans was actually under a blizzard warning in that event. 

Just last week, it snowed again in northwest Florida. Now this storm. 

The Arctic and Greenland blocking helps make the jet stream wavier, which helps explain why there's such a harsh cold spell going on now.  When jet stream plunges south from northern Canada, it's going to be horribly, miserable cold.

There's still a lot of debate in the scientific community on whether climate change itself is making the jet stream much wavier, especially in the winter. 

When that happens, we could see bigger southward dips in the jet stream, like we're seeing now. 

There's at least circumstantial evidence that a wavier jet stream occasional has started  sending at times unprecedented blasts of Arctic air far south, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Per Grist:

"'The problem is that it's really hard to show whether or not that's happening,' said Jacob Chalif, who studies the phenomenon at Dartmouth College. 'Arctic amplification started really kicking off in the '90s, and we only have really solid record of the jet stream going back to 1979.'"

That leaves about a decade of records to help determine whether what's going on now is something new. 

Dartmouth researchers are now using machine learning to get a picture of jet stream patterns during the  the entire 20th century. There's evidence there were even wilder swings in the jet stream between 1900 and 1979. 

So, the jury is still out as to whether a warmer Arctic is increasing the chances that the U.S. will have terrible winter storms due to whacked-out jet streams. 

Another factor is the polar vortex. It's that big whirl of absolutely ridiculous frigid air that roams the high latitudes. When it's in Canada, closer to the United States, chances are at least part of the nation will be on the cold side.

Sometimes, the polar vortex stretches, and becomes more oblong. if it stretches toward the U.S., we get frigid and fast.

Some science suggests that the polar vortex is stretching more frequently than it used to

Per CNN

"Judah Cohen, a research scientist at MIT, said the stretching of the vortex is tied in part to sea ice loss in parts of the Arctic from human-caused climate change. He also said above average snowfall in parts of Siberia raises the likelihood of such stretching events, and this too is influenced by a paucity of sea ice in the Barents and Kara Seas in the Atlantic Ocean."

'"On the southern flanks of the polar vortex, over the U.S. and Asia, an under that where that stretching is happening, there's been an increase in severe winter weather,' Cohen said. 'I'm not saying any one weather event is attributed to climate change,' he said. 'But I do think it loaded the dice here.'"

Even if you ignore the polar vortex and the Greenland Block and the wonky jet stream, the fact of the matter is it's winter. Sure, the climate is warmer, hut that doesn't mean winter is canceled. It can still get brutal out there.

We're living that out right now.  

 

Satellite Photo Today Shows Snow Covering Most Of Northeast

Snow covers most of the Northeast now, as today
visible satellite photo shows. Click on the photo
to make it bigger and easier to see. Unfortunately
for White Christmas lovers, a lot of the snow
cover will be wiped out before the holiday. 

 Skies cleared across almost all of the Northeast today, revealing just how extensive the snow cover is.

A storm that missed Vermont on Sunday laid down a stripe of snow from Delaware to Maine. The Northeast now has a more extensive snow cover this early in the season that it's had in a long time. 

If you click on the satellite photo in this post to make it bigger and easier to see, the snow cover extended all the way down the coast to southern Delaware. 

Sunday's storm hugged the coast, so you can see that north-central Virginia and a little piece of south-central Pennsylvania missed out on the snow. 

Further west, you can see that West Virginia is snowy white, mostly from small weather systems that moved in from the west late last week, and the remnants of lake effect snows from the Great Lakes running up against West Virginia's mountains. 

It's still early in the season so you can see that lakes aren't frozen yet. Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire looks wide open. Same thing for Lake Champlain, as you can just see poking out of some cloud cover late this morning near the spot where Vermont, New York and Quebec converge.

For those of you dreaming of a White Christmas, that's a really iffy proposition for most of the Northeast except for northern New England and a lot of areas near the Great Lakes. 

A warmer weather pattern is taking shape, which will melt the snow. Aside from the wet and windy storm late this week I talked about in this morning's post, northern New England should remain mostly cold enough to get a little more snow before the Big Day  

Most Of Weekend Rain "Canceled" As Frustrating Vermont Drought Rolls On

Canada gifted us with a cold front Thursday and
all we got was a wind shift and a couple clouds. 

 Droughts might not necessarily be the most destructive weather disaster possible, but they are probably the most frustrating.  

I don't mean to dismiss the damage droughts inflict. Each one can cause millions, even billions of dollars in damage to crops, water infrastructure and more. 

In some parts of the world, droughts cause or contribute to famines which can kill thousands. Droughts are not to be messed with. 

Most weather disasters, though, have a pretty clear beginning and end. The hurricane, tornado or flood arrives and does its damage. When you're in it, you have a pretty good idea when it will be over. Then the storm indeed departs, leaving us humans to pick up the pieces. 

A drought sneaks up on you.  You don't realize you're in it until the crops start wilting, the well runs dry and the trees start turning brown. Worse, you have no idea when it will end.  Plus, there's usually no clean break from it.

I look at droughts the way I look at my experiences in airport terminals. Some people are afraid of flying. I'm not. My phobia is airport terminals. 

Airport terminals are where everything goes wrong. It usually takes the form of a slow cascade of escalating trouble. Like droughts. The worst part of airport terminals is you're there, and your flight gets delayed. They don't tell you how long the delay will last, why there's a delay or whether it will turn into a cancelation. 

You don't know whether you'll have to rebook with another airline, how long you will be there, whether you will actually get to your destination, or where you will sleep tonight. The uncertainty is what kills you. You actually feel better getting terrible, concrete news at the airport than you do when you are lingering with all those unanswered questions.

Not knowing what will happen is strangely better than learning your flight is canceled and the next available flight is three days from now. 

Droughts are the same way.  There's no real end date.  No information. There are moments of false hope. Maybe on a particular day during a drought it rains hard for awhile. But then it stops, and you return to endless days of blue skies and dry air. The drought worsens. 

Even when the rains really returns, it takes forever for the drought to actually end. It's hard to end a drought. Months of near average rainfall won't do it. You need months and months of above average rainfall. The chances of that happening are less than 50/50. 

OUR CURRENT EXPERIENCE

That's where we are in Vermont now. Each new forecast, each new day is another piece of frustration. It doesn't rain, again. A forecast that said rain was likely evaporates into a chance of scattered sprinkles. 

A cold front went through Vermont Thursday but you're forgiven if you didn't notice. Most cold fronts at least have a band of showers with them.  This one maybe had a couple puffy clouds. And a breeze that came from the north but didn't affect temperatures all that much. 

The only moisture we had was the patchy dense river valley fog we so often get during calm early mornings in September. The cold front meant temperatures this morning fell into the upper 30s to mid 40s by dawn. There might have been a patch or two of frost again in the very coldest hollows. 

Today is another sunny, dry one. It'll be a couple degrees cooler than yesterday but still pleasant. Except for the arid air that will keep worsening the drought. 

Speaking of worsening, the forecast has dried up too. The hoped for rain this weekend will not materialize. At least not to any great extent.

Earlier forecasts had a disturbance coming down from Canada and going right over us. That would have been good for maybe a quarter inch of rain. Not much, but it would have tided us over for a day or two.

Instead, the disturbance now looks like it will zip by to our north, leaving just a weak trough (basically a semi-cold front) to come through Saturday night. It will have very little rain along it. Plus, the air is so dry most of the small amount of rain coming with that little front will evaporate on its way down from the clouds. 

A few raindrops probably will make it to the ground, but they will basically amount to a trace. It might wet the dust down a tiny bit late Saturday or early Sunday. 

Then it's back to another long period of sunny, dry weather.  It feels strange to curse a string of sunny days in what used to be a perennially overcast Vermont. 

This drought is stubborn. It will actually get a little warmer next week, which is doubly bad. Dry, sunny weather will keep evaporating what little water we have left. When it gets warmer, evaporation rates increase. 

Expect at least some days next week to get up to near 80 degrees. 

Our next shot at rain still looks like it will come in around September 20. Long range forecasts continue to indicate that the weather system that would bring that rain looks unimpressive, so don't expect any kind of nice soaking. 

That would be too much to ask. 

Vermont is stuck in Terminal A of Drought International Airport, and the ticket agents are not telling us anything about whether we'll eventually be able to leave. They're not even offering a drink of water.  

Texas Flood Tragedy News Keeps Getting Worse, Dozens Dead, Many Missing; And How It Happened

Aftermath of the Texas flood. At last report at least
27 people had been confirmed dead, and that toll
was expected to rise

 I don't even know where to begin to start with the immense flood tragedy in the Hill Country of Texas, northwest of San Antonio. 

As I wrote this early Saturday afternoon, CBS was reporting 27 deaths so far - 18 adults and nine children. 

A lot of people are still missing -- officials haven't yet told us how many. We know about a dozen people, mostly children are missing from a Camp Mystic, a childrens' camp along the Guadalupe River.

If you try really hard you get glean some good news out of the tragedy. As of Saturday morning, around 850 people had been rescued. There have been 160 air rescues, and as of this writing, swarms of aircraft, drones and boats were looking for more people. 

There have been some amazing tales of survival. KENS in San Antonio reported one woman had been swept 20 miles downstream and over four dams before being rescued from a cypress tree today. The woman reportedly had just minor injuries. 

While I'm sure there will be other tales of survival, I'm dreading what the final death toll might look like. Not to mention the extreme damage to homes and businesses through a big part of central Texas. 

HOW IT HAPPENED

The Texas tragedy had its roots in Tropical Storm Barry, a completely forgettable, weak tropical storm that splashed ashore in northeastern Mexico last Sunday. 

Barry drew extremely humid air into Texas - extraordinarily steamy even by Texas standards. A small drifting low pressure system over central Texas drew in and consolidated that moisture.  This is Texas Hill country, so the winds were forced to rise upward as ti traveled from the Gulf of Mexico to the   rising elevations west of San Antonio, helping to unleash the floods.

This upslope flow has happened there frequently and has often caused floods,  Enough to this area of Texas is sometimes known as flash flood alley. 

The upslope flow, the remnants of Barry, the subtle low pressure system, the extreme humidity all converged over the Guadalupe River drainage basin and its surroundings. And just sat there. The result was extreme rainfall. 

The fact that a crucial ingredient to this tragedy was a former tropical storm shows that people are not necessarily safe after a tropical storm or hurricane makes landfall.  These things can produce floods far from the where the system came ashore. 

Even here in Vermont. The remnants of Hurricane Beryl were a key ingredient of the extreme floods last  July 10-11 in the Green Mountain State.  

Back in 1995, another fairly lame tropical storm named Dean came ashore in Texas, much like Beryl did. Even though Dean was weak, its remnants interacted with a stalled weather front to produce severe flooding across northern and central Vermont - nearly 2,000 miles from where it made landfall. 

We also have to remind ourselves that climate change has made downpours and storms often more intense than they otherwise would have been decades ago. I do not know to what extent climate change influenced this flood, but I suspect it was at least a small factor. 

THE FLOOD FORECAST AND NOAA CUTBACKS

Some officials in Texas are blaming cutbacks at NOAA and the National Weather Service because of the Trump administration and is DOGE federal worker slash and burn program earlier this year.  Their claim is the forecast underplayed the amount of rain that ultimately fell. 

Those DOGE cutbacks might well cause forecasting errors and in fact might have already done so in other circumstances.  

As Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza explains in his blog The Eyewall, the flash flood was well forecasted, even if the amount of rain that actually fell was unimaginable. 

National Weather Service Forecasts on Thursday gave the region a slight risk of flash flooding, which might have created a false sense of security. Lanza said some high resolution forecast models predicted the huge amounts of rain that in fact materialized.  In hindsight (my opinion here) those models should have perhaps been taken more seriously. But hindsight is of course 20/20.

In any event, the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings shortly before midnight Thursday as the rains began to fall in earnest. In the early morning hours, the NWS declared issued flash flood emergencies, which triggers automatic warnings on everybody's cell phones.

Lanza said the NOAA budget cutbacks did not appear to play a role in this tragedy. Much has been made of cutbacks in weather balloon launches, which offer critical information on impeding storms. The National Weather Service office in Del Rio, Texas, and data from those launches helped prompt the NWS issue those dire "hair on fire" flash flood warnings. 

Then the question was, how were those flash flood warnings received? Or were they?

A blame game has already started. 

Per the Associated Press: 

'AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting business said it also issued flash flood warnings and blamed camp directors for the tragedy. "These warmings should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety,' "

As noted, this part of Texas is particularly prone to flash flooding. Lanza asks a great question: "Do we need to start thinking of every risk of flooding as a potential high-end event we should pre-evacuate the highest risk people (like children and elderly in floodways) for? Is that even practical?"

Some variation of that question is a great one to ask anywhere in the U.S., including here in Vermont. Climate change is helping make downpours more intense, and more likely to cause floods, or make floods worse than they otherwise would be.  

FLASH FLOODS DANGEROUS

We do know that flash floods are extremely dangerous, and the United State has a long history of flash flood tragedies.  

Perhaps the most famous and deadly flash flood in U.S. history was the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1889, which killed more than 2,200 people. Johnstown was hit again in 1977 in a flash flood that killed 84 people. 

Other examples of horrible flash floods include one that hit Rapid City, South Dakota and adjacent areas of the Black Hills in 1972, resulting in 238 lives lost. A flash flood in Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado in 1976 claimed 144 lives. 

Flash flooding in Kentucky killed 45 people in 2022.  Another flash flood in San Antonio on June 12 killed 13 people. 

Additional flash flooding has hit parts of central Texas today. As of early this afternoon a new flash flood emergency was in effect for Burnet County, Texas and parts of Williamson and Travis County. Six to 14 inches of rain fell there last night and this morning. 

This includes parts of the Austin metropolitan area,   The latest update is two people are dead and 10 are missing from this new round of flooding. 

It goes on and on. 

 

Last Week's Austin, Texas Storm Super Wild, Super Weird

From Facebook, photo of damage at Austin Wildlife
Rescue after the massive supercell and oxymoronically
named large microburst in the city last week. 

 Texas is known for its, well, Texas sized storms.

But even by those standards, what hit the Austin, Texas area was absolutely wild.  I guess the "Keep Austin Weird" slogan applies to the weather there as well. 

A fast developing, giant supercell roared over the city on May 28.   It almost, but didn't quite produce a tornado. But it might as well have, given the damage it caused. There were also no other storms around it, just an isolated, big, bad one, Very bad,

It produces  one of the worst microbursts, one of the heaviest rainfall rates and some of the worst hail to ever hit Texas, and maybe the United States for that matter. 

MICROBURST

As the name implies, microbursts hit a relatively small area.  On average, they'll do their damage in a one to two mile diameter area. 

Microbursts, as noted,  are often are as dangerous as tornadoes, as the storm in Austin demonstrates.  Some microbursts carry wind gusts of 100 mph, which is the equivalent of an EF-1 tornado. (For comparison the tornado that hit in Middlebury, Vermont, in March, 2021, seriously damaging one home and causing lighter damage to several others, was an EF-1

The National Weather Service explains what causes these dangerous thunderstorm microbursts.:

Strong updrafts suspend a bunch water droplets in the upper portion of the storm. At some point, the updraft is no longer able to sustain all that stuff, so it lets them go like a clumsy waiter dropping a tray load of dishes. 

When the "tray load of dishes" hits the ground, all hell breaks loose, like it did in Austin, writ large.

The Austin area microburst, despite its name, was pretty huge.  

The damage path was about ten miles long, with a path ranging from one to 2.5 miles wide. Maximum sustained winds within the microburst were probably between 65 mph and 85 mph, with a few embedded higher gusts. The Austin-Bergstrom International Airport had a 77 mph gusts, reports KXAN.

REAR FLANK DOWNDRAFT

To make matters worse, the supercell had something called a rear flank downdraft in which winds reached up to 75 mph.  As KXAN reports:

The National Weather Service mapped out damage
from the May 28 supercell and big microburst.
Area in red is damage from the microburst, yellow
is from a real flank downdraft. The darker
the color, the worse the damage was.

"A rear flank downdraft is caused by pressure patterns within a supercell thunderstorm that force cool mid-level winds quickly down to the ground before getting pulled back into the rotating thunderstorm."

Rear flank downdrafts are common in in supercells, especially strong ones like that in and around Austin last week.

Like the microburst, the rear flank downdraft moved southeastward, in tandem with the microburst that was just to the north and east of the rear flank downdraft.

This downdraft and its 75 mph wind blew right through downtown Austin.  

DAMAGE

The wind, as you'd imagine, knocked down a lot of trees and power lines. About 180,000 residents lost power.  Winds of that speed tend not to seriously damage well-constructed homes, but it was enough to tear shingles off roofs and break windows  I'm sure several homes and other buildings suffered damage from falling trees

Windows and doors were reported broken by the wind at Austin-Bergstrom airport and the Texas State Capitol building in Austin. The canopy over gas pumps at an Austin service station collapsed onto cars beneath it whose owners were taking shelter from the hail. Thankfully, only minor injuries were reported. 

The largest oak tree in Austin's first Black cemetery toppled over and damaged several headstones.

The wind drove large hailstones sideways, damaging the siding on countless homes, Roofs, crops, trees and gardens were also blasted and wrecked.  

Intense flash flooding swept cars off roads and left at least one person dead. At least five others had to be rescued from submerged cars.

 The spot where the microburst first hits the ground is usually where the worst damage is.  In Austin's case, there might have been a train of microbursts, one after another. Or, the supercell thunderstorm that caused it had much more rain and hail to unload than most storms. 

It was also a single thunderstorm and not a line. While all hell was breaking loose on the north side of Austin and its suburbs, it was a pleasant evening with sunshine in the southern end of Austin.

Austin is weird. 

VIDEOS

Compilation of some of the storm scenes in Austin: As always, click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that,

More images, mostly of the flooding from the microburst last week in Austin: Again, click on this link to view, or if you see image below click on that, 

 

Hints Of Springtime In Vermont That Feel Wintry Happening, And Coming Up

River gauge readings from yesterday on the Mad River
in Moretown, Vermont. Click on the image to make
it bigger and easier to read. You can see an
abrupt rise in the river as water backed up behind
an ice jam. Then the river level dropped back down
suddenly when the ice jam broke up.

 No big storms are on Vermont's immediate horizon, but some subtle and potentially frustrating little weather events coming up are sort of signs of spring.  

Even though those signs of spring are paradoxically wintry.

ICE JAMS

The first of course is ice jams, something we had to keep an eye on during Thursday. 

Thawing weather and rain basically created piles of ice. 

There was a lot of ice movement on the rivers, and some of that ice got jumbled up into piles and clogs near obstructions. There were only perhaps a couple real ice jams in Vermont that I'm aware of. They caused at worst minor flooding and minor damage.

The jams didn't form in the "wrong" places - i.e. just downstream from a riverside town or city.  So in this case we didn't have to deal with a lot of buildings getting flooded, 

The most notable jam was - as mentioned yesterday - on the Mad River near Moretown. You can see on the chart in this post how the jam abruptly made the river rise to flood stage. Then the jam apparently broke and the water level almost instantly returned to normal levels.

With colder air in place, if there are any ice jams, they're probably pretty stable for now. They could always abruptly move, but the chances of new problems with these over the next few days is pretty low.

CONVECTIVE SNOW?

Convective clouds and updrafts gather themselves into
rain and snow showers last March 17 in St. Albans,
Vermont.  This time of year, the sun begins to get
strong enough to help power scattered hit and 
miss snow showers even on cold, blustery days.

In the warmer seasons, strong sunshine can cause updrafts.  Under the right conditions those updrafts can help form showers and thunderstorms. That's why we do have those hit and miss storms all summer around here. Those scattered showers and storms are known as convection. 

Now, today by any measure will be a chilly and blustery one, nothing summery about it.  Temperatures will barely get to freezing if that. It's so gusty that a wind advisory is up for most of Vermont outside the Champlain Valley. In the advisory area, gusts to 50 mph could cause some isolated power outages.

Helping with the gusts is the strengthening March sun. It's getting powerful enough to heat the ground to an extent, creating updrafts and instability that can bring higher gusts to the surface. The fields and forest floors are still snow-covered, so the effect isn't nearly as pronounced as it would be with bare ground, but the sun can have an effect. 

The air is a bit unstable to begin with, so a few snow showers are inevitable anyway. That sunshine peaking through the clouds today might help power up some scattered hit and miss snow showers, much like those summer thunder showers.  Since this is convective, a few might be very briefly heavy with stronger, gustier winds. 

Most of us won't see something like this today, but a few places probably will. So yes, a harbinger of spring will probably generate a few minutes-long little mini-blizzards here and there. Luckily, there will be no big snow accumulations out of any of this. 

You're probably going to see more of this type of situation on blustery days during the rest of March and probably a good chunk of April.

BATTLEGROUND

A frustrating aspect of spring - especially in March and April in Vermont - is those pesky stalled fronts in which it seems everybody in the central and eastern U.S. is enjoying spring weather except northern New England. 

The battle line this time of year between the forces of spring and the waning strength of winter is right along the Canadian border.  For the most part, that battle line is further north than, say, January. 

The result this time of year is that as most places warm up, often  a shallow, dense layer of chilly air oozes down from Quebec, making parts of Vermont shiver while places not that far south enjoy balmy, sunny spring breezes.

This set up seems to most often affect the northern Champlain Valley. They cold air hugs the surface and often extends upward only a few thousand feet. 

There's no mountains to block this shallow cold air between Quebec and northwest Vermont, so the chilly air floods in.  You end up with days in which say, Bennington, might be sunny and 60 degrees and St. Albans is stuck in the mid-30s. 

This set up looks like it might happen toward Wednesday. Initially, some warm air would bathe pretty much all of Vermont. Forecasts call for highs in the low 50s Tuesday, which would make it the warmest day so far this year. 

Then that pesky shallow cold air from Quebec seems to want to make an appearance. Currently, forecast highs in the northern Champlain Valley are around the low 40s Wednesday, but I think it might even be colder than that. This situation would probably linger into at least Thursday. 

These things are a little hard to predict and tease out days in advance, so things might still work out differently midweek. We shall see. 

Even so, that low level cold air is another paradoxal sign of spring.  Northern Vermont is in the war to reach spring. Chances are we'll lose the battle Wednesday, but we'll win the overall war eventually. 

Climate Change Is Contributing To "Weather Whiplash" And Helping To Create Big Disasters

Winter, 2025. Super dry weather and extreme winds
caused mass destruction from wildfires in 
southern California. 

The California firestorms are highlighting one of many big problems climate change brings to our world: 

It's what scientists are calling hydrological variability or hydroclimate volatility.

Those are fancy words for weather whiplash involving extremes in rain and snow. With climate change. many parts of the world are increasingly whipsawing from super wet to super dry and back again. 

The current wildfire crisis in California is a classic example of this violent see-sawing related to climate.

The story really starts last winter, and the winter before that.  Winter is the wet season in southern California. Or at least it's supposed to be. The winters of 2023 and 2024 were really, really wet around Los Angeles.  

For instance, in just a single storm in early February, 2024, Los Angeles had five to seven inches of rain, nearly half their annual average total.  Climate change tends to make storms more intense, so this unusually heavy rain kinda makes sense in this age in which the world is warming. 

Then the rain stopped. Southern California went through its normal rain-free summer, and waited for the late autumn and winter rains to return. So far they haven't. The storms are still out there in the Pacific Ocean, and those storms are still very wet. 

But a stubborn weather pattern is keeping those storms away from southern California. Again, this could be, at least maybe, another climate change issue. Some scientists say weather patterns are more likely to get "stuck" so conditions on the ground don't change like they are supposed to. 

All that brush that grew thick and lush in those rainy winters dried out more and more, until, by the beginning of a rainless January, they were tinder. 

Winter, 2024: Extreme rains brought destructive
mudslides to southern California. Two photos
are an example of an increasing trend 
toward weather whiplash

All they needed was a spark, and the arid, gusty winds that sometimes blow in from the interior desert to cause the calamity. 

The rest is sad history. 

Southern California is far from the only place that has been enduring this kind of whiplash. 

We've seen this weather whiplash play out here in Vermont. We went from devastating floods in July. Those catastrophic floods extended into Connecticut and Long Island in August.

But by October and November, the whole Northeast, including Vermont and Connecticut had entered a drought.  

It can also consist of sharp variations in precipitation over relatively small geographic distances. The southern third of California has been extremely dry this winter. The northern third, at least up until recently, has been exceptionally wet.  

This whiplash is increasingly a worldwide problem. Per KQED:

"'I see the last decade as a preview of what we should expect to see more of,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA. Except that 'the wettest wets and the driest dries we've seen recently are not the wettest wets and the driest dried we will see in the coming decades.'"

 There's two main drivers to this flood and drought/fire cycle. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which means storm can gather more water and dump it as more torrential rains.

However, it storms are avoiding a particular area, a warmer atmosphere can pull more moisture from plants and soil, so droughts take hold more quickly, and potential fuel for fires becomes super dry. 

On paper, many areas won't see any major shifts in average precipitation. There will probably be an increase in extremes, but average those extremes out, and that average might be roughly the same as they are now, said John Abatzoglou a climatologist at UC Merced, reports KQED.

California - and presumably other places - should plan on more extremes in the future rather than just basic changes in precipitation totals.  

"Flash Drought" The Cause Of Northeast Fires, Water Shortages

Today started with yet more crystal clear skies over
Vermont, super odd for normally damp November.
It was another moment of a flash drought taking
over the Northeast, including here in Vermont. 

 You've definitely heard of flash floods.

Lord knows we've had enough of them around the nation  - and here in Vermont - this year. 

As we know flash floods are extremely rapid onset inundations. Everything could be fine at one moment, five minutes later cars and even houses are washing away.  

The Northeast is now having the opposite problem: A flash drought.

Flash droughts obviously don't come nearly as quickly as flash floods. But they do hit with pretty shocking speed. Just a few months ago, the Northeast was sopping wet. Now, the region is parches and on fire.

Regular droughts develop over many months and even years. A drought takes hold as month after month, rain and snow fall short. It does rain some but not nearly enough. After many months of such weather, the water has run out.

 Flash droughts usually hit in a matter of several weeks.  Several factors usually gang up on a region to cause a flash drought. 

First, it's the lack of rain - duh!  In flash droughts, the lack of rain is often extreme - the faucets from the sky basically get entirely shut off

Hotter, sunnier than normal weather turbocharges evaporation, so things dry out faster. Add a lot of wind to disperse the evaporated ground water and you go from rain forest to practically the Gobi desert in no time. 

As the Washington Post outlines:

"DC, Philadelphia and Newark each just experience record-long dry streaks. In fact, Philadelphia has only seen 0.69 inches of rain in two months. Most major Northeast cities are running five to seven inches behind average for the past 60 days. 

Temperatures have been running above average, resulting in increased evaporation. For November to date, Boston has been 4.6 degrees warmer than normal. New York has been 4.9 degrees above average, and DC has stood some 7.4 degrees above typical values. Coupled with minimal rainfall, it's no surprise the landscape is rapidly drying out."

Here's another  for example:

New Jersey is so far arguably the hardest hit state with this drought so far. On September 3, absolutely none of the Garden State was in drought. Eight weeks later, the entire state was. The severe version of the drought came in faster. Exactly 0 percent of New Jersey was in severe drought on October 1. Just six weeks later, this past Tuesday, 100 percent of New Jersey was in severe category of drought.

That's an awfully fast onset. 

You've probably heard me say that warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. And that since climate change has made the world warmer, and the atmosphere can hold more moisture, flash floods are tending to become more frequent and worse than they used to be.

That's all true - if there's a convenient storm nearby to grab that moisture and organize it into those torrential downpours.  

But, the weather patterns sometimes get stuck in such a way to divert storms away from a certain region. A big ridge of high pressure in the atmosphere has held more or less firm and strong all autumn in the Northeast.

That's been diverting storms off to our west, south and east this autumn.  

This type of weather whiplash is becoming more common with climate change. Periods of too wet and too dry conditions are getting more extreme, and come at us faster than they used to in this warmer world. The trend will only worsen

In this autumn's case, one result is all those wildfires in the Northeast.

And increasingly worrisome water shortages. For instance, reservoirs serving New York City are draining fast. Schoharie Reservoir, north of New York, was down to 63 percent capacity this past week. Streams flowing into the reservoir were at record low flows, so the reservoir will continue to empty until the region gets a ton of rain. 

In New Jersey, officials are begging residents to conserve water and avoid wasteful behavior like watering lawns. It would take a good ten inches of rain at this point to put a meaningful dent in the drought conditions in New Jersey.

VERMONT AND FORECAST 

Here in Vermont, it hasn't been quite as extreme, but still, the dry conditions have come on with lightning speed.   Less than 1 percent of Vermont's land area was abnormally dry on September 17, and that had increased to 77 percent last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Burlington crossed a threshold Saturday. Pretty much all year, precipitation had been running heavier than normal. Then the dry autumn hit, whittling away at that wet lead. On Saturday, year to date rainfall in Burlington went into the below normal column for the first time this year.

The Northeast- including Vermont - has their best shot in many weeks of seeing a decent rainfall later this week. Unless things fall apart once again, the region could 0.75 to 1.5 inches of rain if an expected storm behaves as expected.

That amount of rain would do very little to get rid of the actual drought, but it would go a long way toward tamping down all those wildfires in the region. 

Unfortunately, the storm could turn out just to be a temporary blip in the drought. Some long range forecasts suggest a return to drier than normal conditions in the Northeast starting in the final days of this month. 

It's That Windy Time Of Year In Vermont/Northeast, Unlike Most Novembers These Winds Are Fiery

Gusty winds last week tossing these chaotic clouds
around over St. Albans, Vermont. We've entered
Vermont's gusty season

 Especially if you live in or near the Champlain Valley or in upper elevations of Vermont, you might have noticed it's been pretty windy lately. 

We've definitely entered the Green Mountain State's gusty season.

Nine of the first 11 days of November in Burlington have featured gusts to at least 34 mph. Three of them gusty over 40 mph. 

The wind in Vermont was strong enough Friday to cause a few scattered power outages. 

Now that we're into November, the weather systems crossing the nation are energized by a jet stream that's usually right over the United States this time of year. 

That means bigger storm systems, which translates to windier systems. Routine low pressure systems or average areas of high pressure for this time of year and still make it plenty breezy. 

It's usually windiest in the Champlain Valley, especially when the wind is from the south. The topography of the Adirondacks and Green Mountains funnels south winds. 

Of course, we also have surges of strong wind from the northwest behind cold fronts and departing storms. That's the situation we find ourselves in today. 

We'll see gusts to 40 mph.  Today will also be an example of how we are now also getting into wind chill season.  Highs today will only be in the 30s to near 40 for most of us. Those gusty winds will make it feel more like it's in the 20s. In other words. Winter. 

FIRES

 In almost all Novembers, all this wind in the Northeast is not a big deal, unless the storm in question is so strong that the winds start blowing down trees or causing structural damage. But that's an exception. Usually it's just hang on to your hat weather. 

We're in a much worse situation this year, though. 

This autumn has featured record dryness in the Northeast, and the brush and forest fires rage on, spread by erratic winds that blow from a particular direction one day, and the opposite direction the next.

Rain that fell on the region Sunday and Sunday night was disappointingly light and din't make a real difference in the situation. What little moisture fell dried out quickly and it's still crunchy dry in much of the East. 

In northern Vermont, we should be OK Tuesday as early morning rain showers, changing to some snow showers in higher elevations have wetted things down again just a little. It'll get us through most of the day, anyway. 

The southeastern half of Vermont got very little or no precipitation last night, and drought conditions are worse there than in  northern Vermont. That means today's blustery northwest could really spread any fires that get going there. The humidity in the air will crash as the sun comes out later, too, which won;t help.

One piece of good news: A 10-acre brush fire in West Brattleboro, Vermont that started Friday was brought under control Sunday. 

From Massachusetts on south and west to the Mid-Atlantic States, it's even worse. Paltry showers early Monday quickly dried out, and existing wildfires continue to burn today. The dry windy weather today just make matters worse. 

A burn ban that was in effect until Monday has been extended another week in southern Vermont. But anywhere in Vermont, you probably shouldn't do any outdoor burns until we get a decent amount of rain and.or snow. 

A red flag warning for fire danger is in effect today for all of southern New England and southeastern New York.  

I think what worries everyone is, if it doesn't rain soon and an intense, dry wind hits, that could drive the eastern wildfires through neighborhoods and destroy houses and other structures. We don't need something like the deadly firestorm that trashed swaths of Gatlinburg, Tennessee back in late November, 2016.

After today, it looks like we'll see a semi-break from the winds for a few days, though Saturday might prove to be blustery.

That seeming anti-rain force field will hold strong over southern New England and much of the Mid-Atlantic States for at least the next week.  Little or no rain is forecast for that region for at least th next seven days.    

Rare Yankton, South Dakota Heat Burst Creates Weird Dawn One-Hour Hot Spell.

 I have a big affinity for Yankton, South Dakota, since that's where my husband was born and raised, and I have several relatives and friends there. 

The Meridian Highway Bridge, now a
pedestrian walkway, in Yankton,
South Dakota. Anyone out on that
bridge around 6 a.m. Saturday
will have experienced a rare
"heat burst" that sent temperatures
up by 20 degrees in 15 minutes.

So I was kind delighted in a weather nerd sort of way when Yankton, a  very nice southeastern South Dakota city about the size of St. Albans City and Town combined, experienced a weird and rare weather event early Saturday morning. 

Bonus: The event wasn't dangerous, but just really strange.

At around 5 a.m. Saturday, the weather was pretty routine in Yankton, if a bit warm for the season. The temperature was 68 degrees, it was vaguely humid for the season. The wind was from the southeast at just 6 mph. 

Then, an hour later a 6 a.m., things took a bizarre turn. The temperature abruptly soared to 91 degrees, rather rare for an afternoon high this time of year  never mind 6 a.m.  During this event, the temperature rose 20 degrees from 70 to 90 degrees in Yankton in just 20 minutes.

Other weird stuff happened in the moment.   The humidity crashed to near desert dry levels, and the wind abruptly started gusting to 40 mph. 

Within an hour, it was over. By 7 a.m., the temperature was down to where it was at 5 a.m., the humidity came back up to where it was, and the wind was light again, but this time from the west. 

So what the hell was all that about?

What happened in Yankton is a wild effect from a dying thunderstorm. A mature thunderstorm ingests hot air and rises. As the storm weakens, the hot air stops rising, and the rain from the thunderstorm starts to fall into dry air.  That leads to the thunderstorm collapsing. Initially, the descending air from the collapse is cool as the evaporating water tends to chill the air. 

Once the raindrops are gone, compressional warming quickly heats up the air due to compression. That air reaches the ground as a big burst of wind that has become hot. 

This kind of thing is rare, and needs certain conditions to happen. The air that starts to descend must begin from really high up.  That gives any rain a head start to evaporate on the way down. There must also be a pretty thick layer of dry air so that the rain evaporates quickly well before reaching the ground.  

For this to work, the downdraft must have a high velocity.  Warmer air tends to rise. So the velocity of the sinking air with a heat burst must offset the fact the warming air is becoming less dense that under normal circumstances would want to rise.

That's mostly the reason it got so windy in Yankton when this heat burst was happening. 

Heat bursts almost always happen late at night or in the pre-dawn hours. 

Heat bursts are more common out west than the are in the East, where we are. They're similar to microbursts, which we do have quite often. The difference is in a microburst, a lot of the precipitation does not evaporate. So you end up with a huge gush of damaging wind and rain. 

Even though heat bursts are rare, this is the second time this year South Dakota has experienced one. In the pre-dawn hours of July 31, the temperature at Mobridge, South Dakota went from 78 to 91 in 15 minutes as winds gusted to 50 mph. 

Some heat bursts can contain damaging winds, so Yankton was lucky in that the wind wasn't too terrible. A heat burst in Oklahoma back in 1996 produced wind gusts as high as 105 mph the cause $15 million in damage.   

Midsummer To Take The Wind Out Of Our Sails

Trees bend in the wind last Saturday in St. 
Albans. It's been a strangely windy summer so
far, but we are now reverting back to our
normal, calmer summer pattern

 Yesterday was another strangely windy one, especially in the Champlain Valley. 

The peak wind gust in Burlington was 39 mph. It was enough for another round of widely scattered tree damage. 

I found myself swerving around a tree branch on Spear Street in South Burlington, and I saw a report of a tree blocking Route 7 for a time between Milton and Georgia. 

Summer is usually a very calm time of year here in Vermont. Yes, you do occasionally get local damaging wind gusts in severe thunderstorms. But other than that, the wind just usually doesn't blow much. 

To get a gusty day, you need strong weather systems, be they large storm systems passing nearby or a contrast between a storm and strong high pressure fighting for control.

Overall weather systems in the summer tend to be weak. "Storms" usually consist of weak cold fronts limping through, with their parent low pressure systems far to the north.  Maybe a bubble of high pressure of meh strength gives us a refreshing north breeze on occasion. Or, the sprawling Bermuda High far off the East Coast pumps a lazy stream of humid winds northward into our neck of the woods.

Trees sway in the wind, pictured on June 27, when
winds were gusting past 30 mph. 

The weak summer systems can still cause a lot of mischief, but wind is rarely one of them. 

You might remember during last year's epic floods on July 10, there was little wind. 

It was an otherwise  weather system of so-so strength that brought incredible amounts of Atlantic moisture into Vermont and dumped it as downpours over our mountains. 

This year, for some reason, the weather systems remained relatively strong up until now. 

Yesterday, a large, strong for the season storm way up by James Bay Canada bumped into high pressure departing to our east to produce the winds. 

This sort of thing happened during most of June. I saw ten days during the month where gusts reached or exceeded 30 mph during June.  That kind of wind frequency is common in say, January, but not June.

As of today, it looks like we're finally getting into the weather patterns more typical of summer, meaning the wind is taken out of your sails as of today. Don't worry if you have a sailboat or anything like that, there will be plenty of breezes to keep you going the rest of this summer.

We just won't have the loud gusty winds we've had lately. Any system that comes through, at least in the near future, will be pretty weak.  

One boundary came through with light showers last night. Behind it, we're in sort of a no mans land of nothing going on. The next thing to come through should set off some showers and local downpours Friday night and Saturday, but that one, too, is no wind bag. Then it's rinse and repeat beyond that. 

The bottom line: It's now safe to unfurl your deck umbrellas again. 

 

"Omega Block" Offers Promises Of Vermont Sun, But Bad Storms California, Atlantic Canada

Schematic of an "omega block" weather pattern, similar 
to what we are in now. Black line would be roughly the
center of the jet stream. This means storms near the
West Coast and off the East Coast, while sunshine
breaks out in parts of the U.S, possibly here
here in Vermont for a welcome change. 

We in Vermont slogged through another day Friday with the ever-present thick overcast, fog, drizzle, wet, inconsequential snow flurries and just general ick. 

Friday was the 11th day in a row that most of us in Vermont saw absolutely no sun. Today, the sun did come out, for at least part of the day in part of the Green Mountain State. So I guess that's an improvement

But pretty much all winter, it's been overcast and foggy. I can't remember the last time we had two sunny days in a row.    

We finally have a chance -  chance, mind you - of actually seeing some fairly decent sun for more than a day  thanks to a weather pattern known as an Omega block.

It's called that because the jet stream maps under this pattern look like the Greek letter Omega. In this case, it features a big bulge northward in the jet stream over southern Canada and the northern United States.

To the east and west of this bulge are deep dips in the jet stream representing nasty storminess off the east coast of North America and along the West Coast .

Storm tracks are being pushed southward under the high pressure in southern Canada and the northern United States.

One such storm hit California Thursday, dumping heavy rains and causing flooding in cities like Long Beach and other southern California cities.  That storm is scheduled to pass through Florida Monday, and become a nasty gale far off the East Coast. 

The next California storm, began hitting California Saturday night and will continue today. This one promises to be even worse. This one could be deadly and disastrous, with severe flooding, mudslides and lots of wind damage. 

Given the dense population this storm is hitting, it will probably be another $1 billion plus disasters. I'll have more on this storm in upcoming posts.  

In a hopeful sign for Sunday, large parts of the sky over
St. Albans, Vermont were clear at sunset Saturday.
This could herald a long awaited somewhat sunny 
period after an incredible stretch of overcast weather. 

Meanwhile, the middle old the northward bulge that makes up the center of the omega block   is producing near record high temperatures in parts of the upper Midwest and south-central Canada. The light winds associated with this also helped produce another big dense fog attack, this time in the central and northern Plains on Saturday. 

For us, we are on the front side of that big northward jet stream bulge in that Omega pattern. 

 Near record warmth will stay confined well to our west, near the Great Lakes and south-central Canada. Northerly winds will keep Vermont's temperatures for the next few days close to normal.

Ho-hum.

The beautiful thing is, the high pressure accompanying this omega block weather pattern might just be enough to finally scour out that low overcast and fog that have kept us without sunshine for nearly two weeks.

Some low clouds will probably sneak in from time to time.  Also, perhaps some other clouds might swirl in every once in awhile from those storms far off the East Coast.  Still, starting Sunday, we have our best chance at seeing some blue skies and sun in quite awhile. These breaks of sunshine, if we're lucky, could last into at least part of Thursday. 

The omega pattern should begin to shift and start to break down towards Friday.  That giant California storm will head our way, but it will weaken tremendously. As it stands now, it looks like that storm will just bring us a return to overcast skies and a chance of some light rain or snow. 

No, Bitter Cold Isn't Coming Anytime Soon, Despite Social Media Click Bait

A brief but intense cold wave last February 3 brought steam
devils and funnels over the relatively warm waters of
Lake Champlain. That cold spell hit in an otherwise
warm winter. Despite the hype, there's no 
guarantees on whether it will turn frigid 
later this winter. 

 If you pay attention to any of the click bait weather sites on social media, you'd think we're headed into a new ice age later on in January. 

Oh, we have a sudden stratospheric warming!  The polar vortex is going to go haywire! Incredible cold is going to envelop the Northern Hemisphere for the rest of the winter! We're ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!

Um, no. Relax, folks. 

For us here in Vermont, and for the rest of the nation for that matter, we probably will see some sharp cold spells in January and February. 

It's winter, after all. Climate change does not prevent subzero cold waves. It just makes them somewhat less likely, 

And honestly, it's incredibly hard to imagine our January will be nearly as much warmer than normal as this December has been. This month will very likely be the second warmest December on record in Burlington. 

THE REALITY

Like all internet hype, there are grains of truth in them and the basic science behind the hype is also fairly accurate. But that doesn't mean a frigid Armageddon.  It just means we'll have interesting weather. Nobody in their right mind is able to tell you what kind of interesting weather we'll see beyond, say New Year's Day.  So we'll have to work with what we have.

To set this up, let's review the basics. First, the polar vortex.  It's a big whirl of cold air in the atmosphere that's always somewhere in or near the Arctic during the colder months. Depending on where the polar vortex is, and how the jet stream is oriented around it, the Arctic air might slip down into Europe, or Asia, or North America. Or it could remain bottled up near the Arctic.

For the most part, the polar vortex has lately been pretty tight and sitting way up there in the far north. That's keeping the bulk of the ridiculously cold air far to our north. That's why it's so warm. 

The jet stream is in the process of reconfiguring itself, so it might get a little colder as we head into the New Year, but it will still be fairly mild. 

The next big thing in the hype machine is that sudden stratospheric warming.  For some reason, in roughly half of all winters, the stratosphere warms up over the far north. It's part of a pattern in which the polar vortex abruptly weakens and gets disorganized. The polar vortex can also stretch out in weird directions and can temporarily relocate it further south. 

When this happens, bitter Arctic air can easily slam southward........somewhere.  Again, could be Europe, could be Asia, could be southern Canada and the United States.

The reason people online are getting the vapors is because there are signs a sudden stratospheric warming might be about to happen.  We're not absolutely sure whether it will happen, but the way signs are pointing, experienced meteorologist wouldn't' be surprised if it does in the next couple of weeks. 

The effects of this on the ground are delayed a bit. So whoever loses the luck of the draw - if anybody - in this, it won't happen until maybe the second half of January into February. 

On top of all this, we have other factors to consider.  We're in a raging El Nino, which keeps the southern end of the jet stream across the U.S. South active. Will a weirded out polar vortex work in concert with El Nino to direct Arctic cold and blizzards into the United States?   Or will El Nino direct any cold air toward Europe?  

The answer? Dunno. 

But wait, there's more! Other complex factors will help determine whether we have any kind of old fashioned Arctic blast later this winter, or will it be another pffft type of season.  

 Will the weather pattern feature a jet stream blowing hard into the West Coast then heading east across America? That could keep us on the warm side. Or maybe a ridge of high pressure will develop over the Rockies and western Canada. That would send cold air plunging our way. Or maybe there will be blocking high pressure in or near Greenland, which could also make us cold and stormy. Another possibility is a ridge of high pressure off the southeast coast, which keep us in New England mild.

Yeah, it's complicated. 

BOTTOM LINE

It's fun to try to read the tea leaves to figure out what the rest of the winter will be like. I plead guilty to that sort of thing. 

Some weather enthusiasts love to imagine epic East Coast blizzards.  That's all well and good. But some of them are wishcasting - defined as forecasting for the kind of weather they want, and not necessarily what will actually happen. 

Basically, don't believe any forecast you hear that's more than five days out. If you wake up on Saturday morning to hear that a blizzard is coming the following Saturday, ignore it until midweek, and then see whether wintry weather is coming or not. 

Chances are, thet blizzard that one computer model run out of of hundreds spit out will go poof, and we'll just have boring January weather instead.