Vermont Week Ahead: Yet More "Flurried To Death" Weather, With Some Twists

 Vermont - at least the northern half - has seemingly constantly snowed this month. 

This National Weather  Service snow prediction map
looks very much like the ones you saw last week.
This new prediction tells us the northern Green
Mountains will get a bunch of additional snow,
while southeastern Vermont misses out again. 

Every day, some snow fell somewhere in the Green Mountain State. Most of the time, not much snow falls on any one day, with the exception of some good dumps in the northern mountains here and there. 

Even in the Champlain Valley, measurable snow has fallen in Burlington on seven of the first 11 days of the month. 

It hasn't been much, as snowfall for the month so far is only a couple inches above average. Snowfall for the entire winter so far is still a good six inches on the light side in Burlington. 

Near the summit of Mount Mansfield, the snow depth has reached 46 inches, which is a little more than the 38 inches that is average for this date at the snow stake. In mid to low elevations, snow depth is up to 17 inches in towns like Westfield and Greensboro. 

In what has been mostly snow-free low elevations in southern Vermont, there's finally a dusting to an inch on the ground. 

MORE SNOW

This flurried to death regime in Vermont will continue all week. There are a few twists and turns to this however, that will make things at times just slightly different than last week. 

Today: An exception to the daily snow rule. Flurries will be hard to come by and at least some sunshine will brighten our Sunday. It'll be a bit warmer than it has been too, with highs well into the 20s, maybe near 30 in the warm spots on southern valleys. That's about normal for this time of year.

Monday/Monday Night: The snow will be back. At least for some of us.  Ahead of a cold front of sorts, it will be fairly mild with many of us reaching the low 30s. But the air will be cooling aloft, which sets us up for some sort of convective snow showers. 

It'll be similar to those hit and miss showers and thunderstorms we get in the summer. Instead of thundershowers, we'll have scattered snow showers. A few, especially later Monday and Monday night, could turn into snow squalls. 

Only some of us will get those. The squalls might lay down a quick one to three inches where they hit, and also reduce visibility and quickly mess with road conditions. 

Forecast precipitation map for Tuesday into 
Wednesday for the United States. You usually
see lots of blues and purples, indicated heavy
rain or snow. But the nation will be remarkably
dry this week, with the only real precipitation
is snow around the Great Lakes and n
in northern New England. 

Tuesday-Wednesday: We'll be back to the same regime we had last week. Persistent snow showers will cover northern Vermont. 

Once again, valleys will only see a couple, maybe a few inches of snow. The  northern Green Mountains will once again see several inches to locally as much as a foot of snow midweek. 

Southeastern Vermont, particularly the lower Connecticut River Valley, will miss out again 

Vermont, and areas around the Great Lakes where there will be torrential lake effect snows, will be the "wettest"  part of the nation midweek.

 Here in Vermont, if you melt down the snow we're forecast to receive, southern Vermont would get less than a tenth of an inch of liquid equivalent, while some northern areas could see more than a quarter inch of "rain equivalent."

Usually this time of year, storms, especially on the West Coast and in the South, often produce heavy precipitation.

There is strangely nothing going on midweek. The whole nation will be dry, which is odd to see in January, But that will change at the end of the week. 

Then things change radically.

Late Week/Next Weekend

The end of the week and next weekend is looking the most interesting, for us here in Vermont and for most of the United States as a whole.

In about six or seven days from now,   it's beginning to look like a really, really nasty Arctic outbreak is going to plunge south from near the North Pole and seriously chill the eastern half of the U.S. 

It's a little early to know how intense this cold snap will be, but it's looking like one of the more intense ones in recent years. 

At first, the bitter air will attack from Canada via the northern Plains, which would turn the wind flow southerly up the East Coast.

That means the snow ahead of the next cold front coming through here could mix with or change to rain for a time around here in Vermont. Too soon to tell for sure, but it's possible. Which would be a bit of a bummer, but you have to expect that from time to time. 

It then looks like that frigid air will spill into northern New England.  Again, too soon to tell, but it's possible we could be looking at well below zero temperatures about seven to 10 days from now.

It's turning into a longer winter than we've seen in recent years 

 

Vermont Gets Flurried To Death, Tons Of Snow In Northern Mountains Results

The latest National Weather Service snow forecast map.
Parts of the northern Green Mountains should continue
to pile up the snow, while low elevations in
southern Vermont continue with their snow drought.

 This is one of those winter periods we have so often in Vermont in which nor'easters and big dumps of snow completely pass us by. 

But some of us get our share of snow, anyway, in the form of sporadic snow showers, light snow and random snowflakes in the cold, damp northwest winds of winter. 

Basically, Vermont gets flurried to death. 

The long siege of snow flurries in Vermont that started last Thursday and will pretty much continue all this week is one of the most impressive I've seen. 

It's true that this type of regime brings big snow winners and snow losers.  Deep valleys miss out, while the central and northern Green Mountains practically drown in powder. That type of situation is writ large this week.

Our latest installment of this phenomenon has been going on since last Thursday and will continue pretty much the rest of this week.

Under this regime, valleys don't get all that much snow, but eventually, he ground whitens even there. The mountains, get creamed, though. 

So far, since Thursday. Westfield, Vermont has received a little over two feet of snow. Montgomery has had nearly a foot and a half. Jay Peak, which always does best in this type of situation, has had three feet of snow in the past week. 

Meanwhile, it pretty much didn't snow at all in the Champlain Valley until Saturday and Sunday. The wind shifted and relaxed a little, so the snow didn't bypass the valley. And Lake Champlain offered its second installment of lake effect snow this winter. 

Deepest new snow on Sunday morning included 4.7 inches in Shelburne, 4.6 inches in Huntington and 4.2 inches in Charlotte.

ANOTHER SNOW BLITZ COMING

We get a break from the snow today, as a little bit of high pressure from the west is interfering with the cold, wet north flow of air. 

But that snowy northwest wind is about to re-establish itself big time for parts of Vermont for the rest of the week.  Some of the snow totals we'll hear about by the end of the week will be impressive, but those big totals will probably be limited to the central and northern Green Mountains. 

This will be  enough that the National Weather Service has issued a long-lasting winter weather advisory from a little after midnight Tuesday morning to at least Wednesday evening for the northern Green Mountains of Vermont and parts of the Adirondacks and other sections of northern New York.

That snow will probably keep falling beyond Wednesday. 

The snowfall in the advisory zone will probably never fall all that heavily, but the persistence is what will pile up the fluff. 

If you're near the Green Mountains in northern Vermont, you can generally expected a good three to eight inches of snow, with locally higher amounts. If you're way up high, near the summits, at elevations of 2,000 feet or more, expect one to two feet of snow by Friday. 

A note that all of Franklin County, Vermont is under the advisory, but sections of the county closest to Lake Champlain probably won't receive a boatload of snow. The National Weather Service in South Burlington says the heavier snow will probably be east of a line from Fairfax to Highgate.

Much of Vermont will receive a little snow, it'll be a dusting to a couple inches.  Parts of the southern Champlain Valley, low elevations in western Rutland County and lower Connecticut Valley might not get any snow at all, or if they do, just a few occasional lonely snowflakes. 

By the time you get down to places like Springfield and Brattleboro this week, the sun will be out much of the day during this whole thing. 

Everyone will be windy and cold during this whole week, though.   Winds will gust to 30 to 35 mph, Tuesday, Wednesday and probably Thursday. High temperatures will only be in the teens to around 20, so wind chills are going to be a problem.

Where there's a bunch of snow, blowing snow is going to be a big problem. The snow that falls will be very light and fluffy, which means the wind will pick it up easily. Expect some big drifts on some of the roads exposed to the wind, whiteout conditions at times, and lift holds at the some of the ski areas due to the gusts. 

Toward the end of the week and early next weekend, those of us who will have gotten snow will see it tapering off. Temperatures will moderate a bit, getting up into the 20s, which actually is fairly comfortable for this time of year. 

Constant Vermont Gloom Continues On; Freezing Drizzle To Return?

Those black specs in this photo are crows flying beneath
yet another day of thick overcast above St. Albans,
Vermont this afternoon.

As I write this at 4:30 Wednesday afternoon, the sun - whatever that is - will set at 5 p.m., continuing Vermont's long stretch of exceptional sunshine-free drabness and gloom. 

Some of us optimists out there had pinned our hopes on bits of dry air Tuesday and today that would have created a few brief breaks in the clouds and thus glimpses of sun.

But nope! The low level moisture in the atmosphere stayed put, and so did the low, gray overcast. 

I don't have the stats to prove it but this has to be close to the cloudiest January, and possibly cloudiest winter so far in Vermont. 

The last time most of us saw any sun was on the morning of January 22. By my count, 22 days this January were either completely overcast or very nearly so. 

We're going to endure more dreary weather for a couple more days. 

But here's a tidbit I found in this afternoon's forecast discussion from the National Weather Service office in South Burlington: "Finally for the weekend, we promise, you'll see the sun!"

I'll get into that in a moment. 

First, the dreary outlook for Thursday. Forecasters have a worse outlook on tomorrow than they did. They had initially told us there's be some light mid and high elevation snow in Vermont with rain mixed in down in the valleys.

At least the higher spots would get their snow cover freshened up a bit right? 

Not so fast. 

Now, the updated forecast for Thursday afternoon has trended in the direction of drizzle and our, um, beloved freezing drizzle or, frizzle as I call it. 

The "frizzle" will be very light and spotty and confined pretty much from the Green Mountains east. It won't cause enormous problems, but those icy patches on untreated roads will return, much like we had to endure during most of last week. 

The freezing drizzle will start to trend toward snow showers on Friday but those snow showers will amount to almost nothing. A few mountain locations could get a whole inch of snow.

SUNSHINE?

Now, that promised sunshine. 

I'm skeptical, but there are signs the sun could break through Saturday and Sunday. A high pressure system is forecast to feed dry air from Canada toward us over the weekend. Also, high pressure areas create sinking air, which tends to erode cloud cover.

The National Weather Service isn't promising wall to wall sunshine over the weekend. Instead, they're saying skies should go partly cloudy. That means periods of sun and sizable gaps in the clouds revealing big patches of blue sky.

We shall see.

If we do see that weekend sunshine, chances are it won't last long. A cold front from northeastern Canada and a storm far off the East Coast will probably throw enough moisture back into northern New England to cloud over the skies next week.