Vermont Meteorological Winter Starts, Ma Nature Gets The Memo

Snow showers start to obscure the view of Lake Champlain
from St. Albans, Vermont on Thursday, December 1
Gusty, cold winds and snow showers were appropriate
conditions for the start of meteorological winter. 

 Yesterday, December 1, was the start of meteorological winter. 

It's the period from December 1 through February 28 (or February 29 on leap years) that climatologists and others regard as winter. 

Astronomical winter is something completely different, of course. That starts on December 21.  

Meteorological winter is set up the way it is, as it makes it easier to compare and contrast past winters and past seasons. 

I noticed here in Vermont, Ma Nature got the memo regarding meteorological winter. Gone was the mild weather on November 30.  It was winter.  (Video at bottom of this post proves it)

On Thursday, bursts of snow came out of the sky, propelled by gusty northwest winds. It was kind of cold, too, with temperatures holding in the 30s.

It wasn't anything unusual for this time of year. Temperatures were actually near normal. But it felt like a winter day, that's for sure. 

Normal temperatures are continuing to plummet, so winter is settling in.  The normal mean temperature today is 33 degrees, at least in Burlington. By New Year's Eve, "normal" will be ten degrees colder than that. 

Actual weather seems to be aiming squarely toward winter, too. Oh, sure, today will be nice enough, and Saturday will be downright mild with a little rain - not snow - thrown into the mix. 

But it will get more and more wintry as we go through the upcoming week. Again, nothing that out of the ordinary for a Vermont December, but definitely winter. 

Long range forecasts also keep us mostly colder than average through the middle of December. 

As winter seemed to settle in yesterday, I, as I often do, took some video clips of a gusty, sometimes snowy December 1 in St. Albans, Vermont.

You can see snow showers move in from the north, gradually obscuring the view of the lake. Then gusts of wind and waves of snow flakes move through. 

You can click on this link to see the video. Or, if you see the image of the video below, click on that to view: 

Meteorological Winter In Vermont: A Really Mixed Bag

A wintry landscape in South Hero, Vermont during a 
chilly January, 2022.  Temperatures and precipitation
were all over the place during the winter, but if you
average it out, temperatures stay mixed, but the 
winter overall was dry in the Green Mountain State.

 Yesterday, I took a look back at February's weather in Vermont and talked about what a mixed bag it was.

Today as we look back at all of meteorological winter, and it, too reflected a muddled season. But the winter did have a theme. 

It was on the dry side, there wasn't all that much snow, and we had a lot of mid-sized, but not epic storms.  

Meteorological winter runs from December 1 through February 28.  The dates are arbitrary, designed for ease of record keeping because the include complete months. And this all makes sense, since December, January and February are the coldest months of the year. 

January, normally the coldest part of winter, was especially cold. But that frigid January was bookended by a relatively mild December and February. 

When you add it all up Vermont temperatures for meteorological winter were mixed.  Burlington came in at 1.1 degrees chillier than normal, mostly because of that frigid January. Meanwhile, the winter as a whole was 2.6 degrees warmer than average in Montpelier, and just a hair milder than normal in St. Johnsbury. 

Storms were frequent, but for the most part weren't huge around here, Especially compared to the epic atmospheric river storms in West during December, and the repeated bouts of tornadoes, floods, severe weather and winter storms in the South.

Up here in Vermont, storms often came in from the west, meaning they didn't have a great moisture supply. Or, some storms  did have a good moisture supply but passed far enough west or east of Vermont to make us avoid heavy precipitation.

The bottom line was a lot of wind, but not much snow and rain. Since those mid-sized storms seemed to spray at us from all directions, we had a lot of bouts with freezing rain, sleet and schmutz over the winter. Even when we did receive decent snows, the accumulations disappeared pretty quickly amid the brief thaws and mixed precipitation

January was especially dry, since the air flow that month came mostly from Canada, where the air is cold and dry. I mean, why do you think that brand of ginger ale is called Canada Dry?

In January Burlington, Montpelier and St. Johnsbury could not even manage an inch of rain and melted snow and ice. Burlington's January total was 0.94 inches. But since January is a relatively dry month to begin with, that wasn't one of the top ten driest Januaries on record.

Still, overall, precipitation only amounted to right around five inches for the three winter months, which is nearly an inch and a half below normal.  Montpelier's winter was a little more than two inches on the dry side, and St. Johnsbury's precipitation deficit was 1.73 inches.

This dryness translates to a lack of snow. Most of Vermont was five to 15 inches shy of normal for snowfall during meteorological winter. 

You can see this trend atop Mount Mansfield. At this point in the season, there's normally 65 inches of snow at the stake near the mountain's summit. As of Monday, the snow depth there was only 48 inches. 

February was a little wetter, as we managed to see enough storms to get us a bit above normal for precipitation in the final weeks of meteorological winter.

Although temperatures yo-yo' a lot during this just ended meteorological winter, we didn't have much in the way of record warmth or record cold. Several daily record highs were established in mid-December around the region, an a couple more were set in late February, but we didn't have any unprecedented warmth that we've had in several recent winters.

A handful of daily record lows were established in the worst of the January cold waves, but those temperatures never even came close to all time lows for the winter.