Record Warmth And Temperature Clash Caused Danger, Storms, Weirdness Across Much Of Nation

Screenshot of video taken through windshield as the
vehicle drove over a bridge with the Texas
wildfire beneath it. 

It's obviously not just Vermont going through strange weather, record highs, storminess and temperature swings. 

Other parts of the nation are getting either blasted or weirded out, too.   

TEXAS FIRES

Probably the most dangerous situation is in north Texas, where wildfires spun way out of control Tuesday amid rock bottom humidity and winds gusting to 70 mph.

 It didn't help that a cold front abruptly shifted the strong winds from the west to the north, making the fires especially erratic. 

One of the fires is the second largest in Texas history.  It's about half the size of Rhode Island and growing. That same fire also spread into Oklahoma and was 0 percent contained as of early this morning. 

The fires sent people fleeing from a series of rural towns and ranches north of Amarillo. 

Though details are still sketchy, the town of Fritch, population 2,000 appears to be hard hit, with an unknown number of homes lost, says the Associated Press. At one point, the city of Borger, population 13,000 was entirely surrounded by fire, so people couldn't flee. 

Several homes in the town of Canadian also burned, according to CNN.

Firefighting efforts and a wind shift kept most of the fire outside of Borger.

The wind has lightened up and cooler weather has arrived. There might even be a small amount of rain and snow Thursday. But dangerous fire conditions are forecast to return next week.  

MIDWEST TORNADOES

At least 13 tornadoes hit parts of northern Illinois, Ohio and Michigan yesterday and last night. That's very far north for tornadoes this time of year, especially that many. 

In late February, there is often an uptick in tornadoes, but those almost always occur in the Southeast during the last winter.  

Screenshot of tornado damage in Michigan this morning. 

In the Midwest, there were several reports of damage, but no serious injuries. Chicago's O'Hare airport was briefly under a tornado warning, but it appears no twisters touched down there. 

A few severe thunderstorms are possible today and this evening in a broad stripe along the Appalachians from Alabama to Vermont, but no additional tornadoes are forecast. 

TEMPERATURE WEIRDNESS

The cold front causing the severe weather and worsening the wildfires also caused lots of strange temperatures changes. 

Yankton, South Dakota was sunny and 70 degrees at 4 p.m. Monday. Exactly 24 hours later, it was 13 degrees and snowing. 

St. Louis reached 86 degrees on Tuesday, its hottest February day on record. Just 15 hours later, it was 60 degrees colder, at just 26 degrees. 

On Monday, Rockford, Illinois reached 73 degrees, breaking the record high for the entire month of February and for meteorological winter, which runs from December 1 through February 29.  That record lasted only one day, as Rockford reached  78 degrees Tuesday, incredible for that far north.

By 7 a.m. today, Rockford was down to 19 degrees with a north wind gusting to 51 mph and a wind chill of 2 above. 

It looks like at least 120 weather stations in the United States had their all time hottest February day over this past week. 

Record warmth hit parts of Canada, too. Ormstown, Quebec, about 50 miles northwest of Alburgh, Vermont,  reached 69 degrees, the hottest February temperature on record in the entire province of Quebec. 

Several cities in Ontario also had their hottest February day on record. The same cold front making temperatures crash in the United States is also hitting Canada. This morning, Sudbury, Ontario went from 41 degrees to 14 in an hour. 

SIERRA BLIZZARD 

A separate storm is set to cause one of the worst blizzards of the 21st century in the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

Between Thursday morning and Sunday morning, lower elevations near Lake Tahoe can expect two to four feet of snow with winds gusting to 60 mph. A little higher up, snow totals are expected to reach four to eight feet with winds gusting to 100 mph. 

Forecasters warn that travel will become virtually impossible for days, that stuck cars could end up being entirely buried in snow. Whiteout conditions will quickly disorient anyone out on foot. So it's a dangerous storm. 

One of the few bright sides to this storm is that total snow cover is lagging a little bit in the Sierra, and this will help them catch up. 

Another Weird Summer In November Event Just Happened. Now, Welcome To Winter

The tiny stream that runs by our St. Albans, Vermont house,
which in a grandiose way we named the Woof River, was
at its highest level in since at least this past spring
after heavy overnight rain. Still well short of rising enough
to cause any problems, though. 

 The remnants of Hurricane Nicole just gave Vermont yet another weird dose of summer in November weather overnight, with off-hours record breaking high temperatures, and more tropical downpours. 

This is it, though. 

Temperatures will cool today, and winter will start tomorrow. Before you get too nervous, by winter, I mean temperatures that hold in the 30s to near 40 by day, and subfreezing at night. With some snow risk. More on that a moment. 

But first, the remarkable warmth, once again. 

It started yesterday, when the temperature reached 69 degrees in Burlington.  That was just two degrees shy of the record high for the date. 

Then, the remnants of Hurricane Nicole pushed even warmer, more humid air into Vermont overnight.  The temperature in Burlington rose to 71 degrees at around 4 a.m., breaking the record high for the date of 70, set in 2012.

This record is all the more remarkable because record highs usually occur in the afternoon, not at what is normally about the coldest part of the day. (That said, record highs are sometimes, though rarely set at night between late autumn and early spring  in Vermont).

Dew points - a good measure of how humid the air feels - were in the low to mid 60s in the predawn hours across Vermont. That's the second time it's been so humid this month in Vermont. Such humidity levels are practically unheard of this late in the season.  

While Burlington was at its record high of 71 degrees before dawn, the dew point was 65. That would have been regarded as a pretty muggy night for us in July. No records are kept on dew points that I know of, but I'm pretty sure that's the highest humidity I've ever seen in Vermont so late in the season.

Ten of the first 12 days of November this year have had highs of at least 60 degrees in Burlington. The normal highs during this period are within a couple degrees of 50.

I've still got a couple flowers blooming in pots that I haven't taken in yet. Truly bizarre for November. Yet again. 

 On top of the warmth, the cold front coming into it created more torrential downpours, the kind you see in the summer. The same thing happened in parts of Vermont last Sunday.

A flower tries to hang on in an outdoor flower pot I haven't 
stored away yet. It's been warm enough for some outdoor
plants to stay green. Some day lilies I cut down for 
the winter are starting to grow back again. 

This time it was more widespread, as a north to south band of heavy rains crossed the state this morning. Burlington had 0.74 inches of rain in just one hour. 

As expected, storm total rainfall is over one inch for most of us, and approaching two inches for some people. 

Burlington was closing in on 1.5 inches for a storm total as of 8 a.m. I haven't seen any reports of flooding, other than ponding of water on roads, that kind of thing. 

The rain will taper off this morning and temperatures will cool during the day. This is the end of the wacko summer in November regime we've experienced. 

WELCOME TO WINTER 

The cold front this morning represents the major pattern change we've been talking about that will keep us generally colder than normal for much of the rest of the month. 

I'm exaggerating a bit when I say winter is coming up next week. It won't be the least bit extreme for November. But this time of year, when it's even a little cooler than average, it can still feel pretty wintry and bleak.  

Even though no big snowstorms are imminent,  make sure pretty quickly that you're all set with snow tires, and your snow shovels are at the ready. 

Sunday won't be all that bad for November, with highs in the mid and upper 40s and just scattered cold, light rain showers around.  That's absolutely, perfectly normal for this time of year.

Monday and Tuesday get more wintry, with highs staying near or a little under 40 degrees. Raw and nasty. If it does snow, it'll probably just amount to snow flurries in the mountains. Again, it's November.

Our best shot of snow comes Wednesday and Wednesday night.  A coastal storm wants to get itself together. But it won't be a powerhouse. And it might go too far east and south to give us a lot of precipitation. 

There's still a lot of question marks with this one, though. But expect at least a little wet snow and maybe some low elevation cold rain with that midweek system.

As advertised, the colder weather pattern for much of the nation seems like it wants to last a good 10 days to even two weeks.

In general, the core of the coldest air seems like it wants to stay to our west, over the Midwest and Plains and probably the northern Rockies. So it will be a long chilly spell, but mostly not out of the ordinary for this dark, clammy and chilly time of year.  And there might even be a warm-ish day or two thrown in the mix if we're lucky. 

Remarkably, Burlington, Vermont has not had its first snow flurry of the season yet, while cities far to our south have. Oklahoma City joined the Burlington snow beaters last night, picking up 0.4 inches of snow. 

Other southern locales that have had snow before us include St. Louis and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.

The lack of autumn snow in Vermont tells us nothing about whether we'll have a snowy winter or not. There's plenty of examples of a winter that starts out with practically no snow then ends up burying us. 

The most notorious example was the winter of 1992-93. Through December 31 that winter, only a paltry 5.5 inches of snow had fallen in Burlington.  By the time that winter was over, the snow total was 116.9 inches. That's our fifth snowiest winter on record. 

So skiers and riders, chin up!