Quick Hitting, Fast Storms To Zip Through Vermont/New England, Windy, Maybe Snow, Too?

The last leaves of autumn clinging to the trees in St.
Albans on Monday under overcast, gusty skies. 
The leaves won't last much longer on those trees.

 The first in a series of fast moving storms zipped through yesterday and last night, spraying us with a little rain, and gusts of winds. 

The next week or so will feature more of the same: Lots of wind, quick hits of rain, which won't be particularly heavy, and, with each passing cold front, increasing chances of snow with temperatures stepping down with each front. 

Since temperatures will stay cool, especially in the mountains, this might portend an early ski and riding season. 

Each storm will deposit a little snow in the mountains. More importantly, for resorts that want to get an early start, like Killington the chilly air has the snow guns blasting. 

WPTZ reports Killington had 175 snow guns firing away on their slopes this past weekend. I'm sure they will have plenty of opportunities to make snow in the coming week to 10 days. It'll trend colder than normal, especially as we head into next weekend. 

There's no word yet on when Killington will open, the resort says they hope to open soon. 

The series of modest, but gusty storms could gradually increase snow depths on the northern Vermont summits over the next week. I wouldn't be surprised if the top of Mount Mansfield and Jay Peak have close to a foot of snow on the ground by this time next week. 

Unlike recent oddly mild Novembers, this one is shaping up to be more traditional in Vermont: Windy, overcast, unsettled, with occasional cold rain and wet snow. Lovely. 

THE DETAILS

The first gusty storm, as we know, went through with light showers yesterday and last night. 

This storm got weird in Massachusetts. A brief tornado might have touched down around Somerset, near Fall River late last night in southeast Massachusetts. Other nearby towns had strong, straight line winds.

It looks like the National Weather Service will investigate those reports. 

Nothing like that in Vermont, but you'll still feel those blustery winds today.

Places on and near the east slopes of the Adirondacks and Green Mountains could see gusts as high as 45 mph.  That would be enough for some isolated power outages. 

Most of us should stay dry, though the Northeast Kingdom should stay with the showers into the early afternoon. High spots like Jay Peak will probably see some snowflakes. 

The next storm comes at us fast, zipping in from the west, strengthening as it does so.  It won't have a huge amount of moisture to work with, so we'll just have periods of light rain and Wednesday afternoon and some gusty showers tomorrow night. There could even be a rumble of thunder. 

Rainfall with the Wednesday night storm will probably run from about a tenth of an inch south and maybe a third of an inch north.  Not enough to help with the lingering drought, but it won't hurt, either! 

The back side of the storm late Wednesday night and Thursday will feature winds even stronger than today.  We might see a wind advisory as gusts could reach 50 mph in a few favored spots and 40 mph in quite a few other locations. That could cause a few scattered power outages once again.

The gales of November indeed.

On Thursday morning, those of you living at or above 1,500 feet in elevation could wake up to a slushy coating of snow. Mountain summits could see a few inches of snow, we'll see!

Another quick system comes in Saturday, but shouldn't be a biggy.

Things could get interesting with the next zippy storm Sunday. A blast of really cold air should come behind that one, which could give valley floors, even in the warmer Champlain Valley, some snow. It's too soon to say how much, but we do know it won't exactly be a tremendous blizzard. 

It'll probably be closer to a dusting in the valleys, with several inches up in the mountains. 

You know how the first snow of the season is in Vermont.  A dusting of snow, and the fact that people have somehow forgotten how to drive in the winter can turn a simple drive to work into a real, frustrating and sometimes scary mess.

I'm already dreading next Monday. 

But, forecasts can change, so we'll keep an eye on it.  

Last Week's Rain Didn't Ease Vermont Drought, Says Weekly Report

The new weekly U.S. Drought Report issued
this morning is unchanged from last week.
Red in central Vermont is extreme drought.
The orange covering almost all the rest
of the state depicts severe drought. 

Lately, many of us have waited with bated breath to see the weekly Thursday U.S. Drought Report to find out how badly our big drought is punishing Vermont.  

The one that came out this morning show us last week's rain didn't help at all with the drought. 

On the bright side, things didn't get worse, either. Instead, drought conditions in Vermont are exactly the same as the week before. 

The same zone of extreme drought covers central Vermont. Most of the rest of the state is in severe drought, just like the week before.

Also like the previous week, only the extreme northwest and southeast corners of the state are "merely" in moderate drought. 

Drought conditions were also unchanged in most of the rest of New England, with the worst conditions in central Vermont, central New Hampshire in southern Maine. 

The Drought Monitor people explain it this way:

"In New England, heavier rains of mostly one to locally four inches were only enough to put the brakes on the developing drought, as streamflows decreased substantially after the event and rains struggled to infiltrate deeper into soils. Additionally, significant short-term rainfall deficits still exist in many areas despite the rain."

One way to look at it is to see what happened to Lake Champlain after the rain. If soil moisture had been adequate, last week's rain would have created more runoff and rivers would have risen noticeably. The Lake Champlain lake level would have also risen by perhaps a few inches.  

Instead, the lake level only went from 93.03 inches to 93.13 inches. That's barely a blip and still a remarkably low lake level. As of Wednesday, it was back down to 93.07 feet. 

The Drought Monitor measures conditions as of Tuesday, two days before the report is released. It hasn't rained in Vermont since last Friday, and no rain is in the forecast until at least Tuesday. So, chances are, the drought will go back to its worsening trend after this week.

As you'd expect, Vermont and surrounding areas are still increasingly suffering from this drought.  

According to Vermont Public, the state's Department of Environmental Conservation has received reports of more than 400 wells running dry since August. That's four times as many as they received from 2016 to 2025. 

About 40 percent of Vermonters get their water from a private well. But information on what share of that total is from spring-fed wells or dug wells. 

Drilling a new well can cost $20,000, and there's little public assistance for people who need a new well. This is turning into a financial crisis as well as a water crisis for many Vermont households. 

Vermont ski areas are warily watching the drought, WPTZ reports. At Sugarbush in Warren, the snowmaking ponds have enough water to start the season. But the resort relies on the Mad River to withdraw water for snowmaking. The river has to be above a certain level for that to happen. Right now, the river is far too low to allow the resort to pull water from it. 

Sugarbush officials are hoping some good late autumn rains arrive to fill up the Mad River, and the snowmaking ponds. 

Jay Peak has invested in snowmaking equipment that uses less water than old systems but makes about the same amount of snow. 

Climate change overall is making New England wetter. But paradoxically, droughts are worsening, too. 

Much of the rain we do get comes in short, sharp, extreme events, and the long, slow wet periods we used to see are less frequent. For instance, almost all the Vermont rain in September fell in just four or five days. 

Also, weather patterns seem to be getting "stuck" one way or another, wet or dry, for longer periods. The climate is warmer than it used to be, too. Warmer weather tends to increase evaporation, allowing droughts to develop more quickly and become more severe. 

That's what happened in Vermont this year. The drought started developing in July, one of the warmest on record. Then it abruptly, seriously deepened in mid-August amid a record breaking and extraordinarily arid heat wave.

September was also very warm and dry, which exacerbated things even further. October is opening the same way - warm and dry.  

Long range forecasts offer us Vermonters little encouragement. It still looks like an occasional series of light rainfalls might start around October 9, but so far, each "storm" looks modest and would do little if anything to ease the drought. 

Study: Ski Areas Losing Billions To Climate Change

Screen grab from live cam at Bear Mountain section of
Killington Resort, Vermont, taken March 4, 2024. Note
the unusual lack of snow in the woods in the background
A study indicates climate change is 
costing the ski industry billions of dollars. 

 To put it mildly, this has been a lackluster Vermont ski season, given the record warm winter, frequent thaws with rain thrown in every once in awhile. 

Vermont's experience this year is probably part of an expensive trend ski areas are dealing with. Here's the AP summing it up: 

"U.S. ski areas lost $5 billion from 2000 to 2019 as a result of human-caused climate change and could lose around $1 billion annually in the 2050s depending on how much emissions are reduced, a new study found."

The ski area losses are an example of how climate change is already starting to dent the economy, at least in some sectors.  

The Associated Press continues:  

"'It's a now problem, not a future-looking problem,' said Auden Schendler, senior vice-president of sustainability at Aspen One, a ski and hospitality company that helped fund the study, published in Current Issues in Tourism."

The study looked at 226 U.S, ski resorts and  used 1960-1979 as a baseline. Those years were before climate change had a noticeable effect on ski conditions. 

Then they looked at the seasons between 2000 and 2019, and found those season were shorter by 5.5 to 7.1 days compared to that earlier, golden era.

This despite the fact that snowmaking technology and capability was much better in the 2000s than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, 

Looking to the future, it gets worse:

"Under an optimistic emissions reduction scenario, the future of the U.S. ski industry would see seasons shortened by 14 to 33 days in the 2050s, even with snowmaking. A high-emissions scenario would nearly double the days lost."

Obviously, this trend will be uneven, with winners and losers every year. Vermont ski areas are salivating for just one damn snowflake for gawd's sake. Meanwhile, resorts in the Sierra Nevada have so much snow now they don't know what to do with it. 

Overall, though, the trend on skier days and skier visits will be drifting downward.  Making snow will only get you so far.