Vermont weather geek's hodgepodge of weather and climate news and opinion. Often Vermont focused, but taking a national and global approach, with sometimes an appropriate dash of fun, outrage, cynicism and compassion.
A hole in a home's ceiling west of San Antonio, Texas. Hail was big enough to punch through the roof of the building and into the living room. Photo via Twitter @vortexrfd
Hail the size of baseballs or even bigger slammed parts of three good sized metropolitan areas last night, surely creating a very expensive disaster.
The areas hit were the San Antonio, Texas area; Dallas-Fort Worth - especially the northern suburbs; and Oklahoma City, especially its southern suburbs around Norman.
One person suffered a head injury near Norman as a result of the hail, the NOAA's Storm Prediction Center noted in its daily storm summary.
Since the hail was widespread and hit populated areas, this could well be yet another $1 billion plus disaster.
Hurricanes and tornadoes get all the dazzling news coverage, but hail is often the most expensive kind of weather in the United States. Insurance claims for hail damage routinely pile up to around $10 billion annually.
Huge numbers of cars, windows, roofs. skylights, siding and landscaping in the three metro areas affected by the supercell thunderstorms were damaged and destroyed. Insurance adjusters are going to be incredibly busy.
In some cases, giant hail pierced through roofs. Social media photos from Sabinal, Texas, west of San Antonio showed holes in a home's ceiling wherehail bigger than softballs crashed through the roof, attic and into the living room.
Another image showed a Texas Honda dealership with broken windshields on all the cars on the lot.
Photos from Norman, Oklahoma show the effects of baseball-sized wind-driven hail. Windows were shattered and window shades were shredded.
Large hail driven by high winds, shredded this window and window shade in Normam, Oklahoma last night. Photo via Twitter by @marekcornett
Near Fort Worth, one person with a sense of humor, demonstrating the size of the hail, took a photo of a cinnamon bun next to a similarly sized hailstone.
A few tornadoes were reported with some of the hail-producing supercells, but those twisters seemed to hit more remote areas and caused relatively little damage.
Today, severe storms are a good possibility, mostly in a band from northern Mississippi up the Appalachian chain as far north as the northern suburbs of New York City.
Weather patterns remain favorable for more severe weather over the weekend and next week over swaths of the South and Midwest.
VERMONT RAIN
The Green Mountain State won't see any hail anytime soon, but we're finally getting quite a bit of needed rain.
Yesterday's showers produced roughly a third to a half inch of rain, with locally higher amounts. Another good slug of rain should come through later today and tonight with an additional half inch to an inch of rain
Showers tomorrow will add a bit to the total, and more weather disturbances next week could deposit even more precipitation.
Some favored high elevation places in Vermont could see a total of up to three inches of rain over the next seven days. Most of us will probably see well over an inch in that time period. Which is great news with the current low water tables and rainfall deficit that stubbornly lingers.
The only trouble with this is there won't be any long periods in which we can get outside in nice weather, but we'll take it.
Another problem is that dreaded "S" word. It'll get cold enough for some snow Friday night, mostly at elevations above 1,500 feet, but a few snowflakes could make it down lower in elevation than that. Some mountain peaks could get several inches of snow out of this.
It won't be nearly as bad as the snowstorm that hit Vermont last week, though.
Today, we bring you relatively good news about tornadoes: This month in the United States, there hasn't been all that many of 'em.
Up here in Vermont, we still need rain. And we're going to get it. More further down in the post. But first, tornadoes!
QUIET TORNADO APRIL
As Bob Henson notes on Twitter, through this past Monday, only 51 tornadoes had been noted in the United States this month.
On average, there are usually between 150 to 200 tornadoes in April.
There were as many as a dozen tornadoes yesterday in Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma. There will likely be a few more twisters today. But there almost certainly won't be any big tornado outbreaks before April closes out Friday. We might end April with fewer than 100 tornadoes, only the fourth time that's happened since 1990.
Several influxes of cool, dry air from Canada into the Midwest and South have squelched tornado activity this month. One crucial ingredient for tornado outbreaks are surges of warm, very humid air from the Gulf of Mexico into the heart of the country. That has generally been lacking this month.
Overall, 2021 has been a relatively slow year for tornadoes, at least so far. Through Monday, there had been 269 tornadoes in the United States. Through the month of April, we usually have about 300 tornadoes.
March was a relatively busy month, compared to average. There were 191 tornadoes in the U.S. in March, 2021 including one oddly here in Vermont.
Long range forecasters had noted earlier this year that large scale weather patterns this spring would have some similarities to that of 2011. That prompted predictions of a busy, dangerous spring and early summer tornado season of 2021.
That still might happen, of course. May and early June are the peak months for U.S. tornadoes. The average number of U.S. tornadoes in May increases hugely to 276. In June, the average number is 243.
We definitely have a long way to go with this year's tornado season. At least we're off to a good start.
Sadly, ten people have died in tornadoes so far this year. Still, that's not bad compared to some years, like 2011 when the death toll was in the hundreds.
The very strongest tornadoes, ones with a category of EF-5 with winds of over 200 mph, are obviously the most dangerous and deadly.
It's been a long time since the nation has seen of those monsters, too. As Andrew Siffert noted on Twitter, we've gone 2,900 days or about eight years without an EF-5 tornado. If we go another three weeks or so with no EF-5s, that would be the longest stretch on record. Fingers crossed!
VERMONT RAIN
I've been harping all year that we need rain to overcome a lingering drought in Vermont. It seems this spring the only we get needed moisture it comes as snow.
Perhaps a little hard to see here, but an indication that Vermont still needs rain. The other day I dug into a pile of soil I left last fall. A few inches down, it was still as dusty as it was when I piled it up. (dusty part is lighter brown/tan) We haven't had enough rain to percolate down.
So some good news for the rest of the week: We have a decent amount of rain coming. And unless you live in a high elevation, it'll be all rain, not snow. (And the high elevation snow won't amount to anything much).
Clusters of showers keep moving roughly west to east along a wavering weather front that is positioned mostly just to our south. One cluster clipped Vermont overnight with some rain central and south.
Other batches of showers are due this afternoon and evening, Thursday afternoon and evening and on Friday. Overall these showers could accumulate to an inch of rain or more by the time we roll into Saturday. Some places could get more than 1.5 inches.
That's not exactly torrential, given that the rain will come over three days or so. But it will help at least a little. We still need a few to several inches of rain to overcome a deficit we've accumulated since last year.
Massive tornado crossing a highway in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, April 27, 2011. One of 300+ tornadoes in this outbreak Today is the tenth anniversary of arguably the worst tornado outbreak in U.S. history.
People across the South, Midwest and East today are marking the tenth anniversary of arguably the worst tornado outbreak in United States history.
Since April 25-28, 2011, all other tornado swarms are measured against this epic outbreak, which peaked on April 27 that year.
A whopping 350 tornadoes or so touched down in the United States during this outbreak, the most in any swarm in history. Some videos of this incredible event are at the bottom of this post.
Meanwhile up here in Vermont, the same storm system spawned our own smaller, but still very significant disaster in the form of a destructive flash flood that also greatly contributed to a record flood crest on Lake Champlain. More on Vermont's issues that week further down in this post.
The tornado outbreak of 2011 easily outdid the previous record for a tornado outbreak in the United States, one that produced 148 tornadoes in April, 1974.
If you combined all the paths of the tornadoes in the 2011 outbreak into one continuous string, it would extend 3,200 miles. The part of the nation hit by tornadoes was immense, too, extending from central Texas to central New York.
The tornado outbreak was especially notable for the number of strong and extreme tornadoes in produced, especially in Alabama. That state suffered 240 of the tornado deaths attributed to the outbreak.
Fifteen of the tornadoes were rated EF-4 or EF-5, the strongest possible. It's rare to get as many as three or four tornadoes that strong in a single outbreak.
These strongest tornadoes also traveled great distances at high speeds, making them especially deadly. The Weather Channel says the average path length of the 15 strongest tornadoes was 65 miles, and they had a forward speed of between 45 and 70 mph.
Red dots depict all the tornado reports just on April 27, 2011 and don't include the reports on the previous two days and the day after.
As you can imagine, debris was scattered far and wide by this tornado swarm.
A photograph sucked up by an EF-5 tornado in Phil Campbell, Alabama was later found 220 miles away in Tennessee. A jacket picked up by a tornado in Hackleburg, Alabama was later found 68 miles away.
The most famous of the many tornadoes in this outbreak was a monster EF-4 that traveled an 80-mile long path through Tuscaloosa, Alabama through the northwestern suburbs of Birmingham, killing in total 65 people.
That is a very, very long track for a tornado. The parent tornadic supercell thunderstorm held together for an incredible 380 miles from southeastern Mississippi to western North Carolina.
The tornadoes were unrelenting, especially in and around Alabama, which suffered at least three rounds of destructive tornadoes. The town of Cordova, Alabama was struck by two strong EF3 tornadoes on April 27, 2011, one early in the morning and the other during the afternoon.
Today, the 10th anniversary of this disaster, is surely a somber day, especially in Alabama.
VERMONT IMPACTS
Vermont escaped the tornadoes of April, 2011, with the closest one touching down west of Albany. Instead, we got a destructive flood, one of several in that devastating year of 2011.
Snowpack in Vermont in the early spring of 2011 was at near record high levels, especially in the mountains. The month of April leading up to this event was very wet. There had already been one damaging flood a couple weeks before this event.
Even before the April 26-27 storm, Lake Champlain was well above flood stage.
Severe flooding along the Lamoille River near Cambridge, Vermont on April 27, 2011. Major damage from flooding in much of Vermont that day
The days leading up to this flood were also quite warm, which primed the pump by softening and melting all that mountain snow.
An initial round of showers and some thunderstorms associated with the storm and tornado outbreak came through Vermont early on April 25, sending rivers close to bank full.
Then, in the evening and overnight hours of April 26, repeated, heavy early season thunderstorms rolled over Vermont. Some were almost severe, which is odd for so early in the season. For instance, St. Albans was barraged by a lot of dime sized hail in one storm.
More importantly, these storms contained torrential downpours. Two to five inches of rain fell on northern and central Vermont, especially around the Lamoille River Valley. That evening and overnight, flash flooding from small creeks and streams roared out of the mountains and into northern Vermont towns.
A little stream by my house in St. Albans, normally a few inches deep at most, was suddenly five feet deep. It caused flash flood damage on my property via washouts and debris flows. I've never had anything close to a flash flood before or since that event.
The Lamoille River went into major flood, with one of the highest crests on record. Dozens of homes and businesses flooded, especially in Johnson and Jeffersonville. Northeast New York and northern Vermont were declared major disaster areas, as flood damage exceeded $9 million.
The water from this flooding inevitably flowed into Lake Champlain, forcing the lake into its highest crest on record, 103.2 feet on May 6, which of course created yet another multi-million dollar flood disaster.
ECHO WEATHER PATTERN
Interestingly, the weather pattern this week is vaguely similar to that of late April, 2011, but the ingredients certainly are NOT there for a repeat of that calamity ten years ago. A few tornadoes might spin up in the Plains and Midwest today and tomorrow. A brief twister could conceivably even touch down in western New York tomorrow.
But this week's rough weather will be a typical spring severe storm episode, and won't be especially noteworthy.
A nearly stalled weather front will also waver near Vermont this week, much as one did on April 26-27, 2011.
Very much unlike ten years ago, the weather front this week will produce only a moderate amount of rain. This rainfall will do far more good than harm, and won't lead to flooding. The expected rains later this week will help put a dent in Vermont's lingering drought.
Videos:
Terrifying television tornado coverage by legendary Alabama meteorologist James Spann as the giant tornado roared into Tuscaloosa:
An even scarier close up view of the Tuscaloosa tornado as it roars past an apartment:
Excellent overview of tornadoes/destruction in Alabama from ABC 33/40, which is Spann's television station:
Finally, a video I took of powerful floodwaters along the Lamoille River near Cambridge, Vermont on April 27, 2011.
It's ba-a-ack! A little dusting of snow on my St. Albans, Vermont deck this morning. Despite that bit of overnight moisture, strong winds and dry air will create a fire hazard today in Vermont/New England.
On Mondays, I like to set the tone for the week.
However, here in Vermont, there's no tone today, at least in the weather forecasting department. Expect a little of everything.
Showers yesterday and last evening didn't amount to all that much. It got abruptly colder overnight, and that four-letter "S" word made a reappearance.
here was a dusting of it on my decks early this morning before it quickly, mercifully melted away.
Despite the light showers and those flakes of snow, there's a fire weather hazard today, believe it or not.
Like I said, it didn't rain much, so what moisture there is will quickly disappear off last year's old, dead stuff out in the fields and forests. Despite the spring green up, last year's dry stuff is still there, noticeable and ready to catch fire given the right conditions. ,
Dry, gusty winds were already blowing as dawn broke today, and those winds were bringing in some arid air.
The combination of low humidity this afternoon - at or below 20 percent - and winds gusting as high as 35 mph will make the risk of hard to control brush fires pretty high this afternoon in much of New England.
There's ared flag warning in effect today for the southern half of New Hampshire and southwestern Maine. The warning is an alert for high fire risk.
The National Weather Service in South Burlington went with a special weather statementfor all of Vermont noting the worries about brush fires today. "If any fires were to start, the weather and fuel conditions could cause the fires to quickly get out of control and be difficult to contain," the special weather statement says.
Today is NOT the day to get rid of that brush pile in your yard with a fire. I doubt many town fire wardens would be issuing burn permits today, anyway.
Fire weather concerns will probably continue tomorrow, but at least it won't be as windy then.
Of course, we still need the rain and it looks like some is on the way later this week. How much rain is an open question.
The forecast for later in the week has changed from some of the ones I saw late last week. Rather than a strong ridge of high pressure giving us very warm and dry conditions, the ridge is weak and weather fronts will be draped over Vermont, or at least nearby Tuesday night into Friday.
Weather disturbances will be moving along and through these fronts, so the combination makes us ripe for showers. Timing and intensity of the showers is a big question mark. For now, expect just a general risk of on and off rain from midweek on.
It'll start off kind of mild Wednesday and Thursday, and then get nippy again by Friday and especially Saturday. Nothing bone chilling, but by Saturday, the expected high temperatures in the low 50s are about ten degrees cooler than average.
It's later in the spring now, so cool spells are losing their intensity, thank goodness. There's a huge difference between the beginning of April and the end of the month.
Pecos Hank doesn't take himself too seriously, and he's a great storyteller. Plus unlike in so many other storm and tornado chasing videos, the ones Pecos Hank gives us are not yell fests. The focus is on the storm, not the chaser.
Olbinski is a favorite of mine because he is such an artist. He pays the utmost attention to the details in his cinematography.
He's the best at capturing the grandeur of both the storms he captures and the landscape those storms affect.
We all expect a sharp crispness to Olbinski's photography, and that's precisely what you get and more. After all, when he's not chasing storms, he's an accomplished Arizona wedding and portrait photographer.His editing technique comes through expertly. He can make lemonade out of lemons
You can tell that some of the storms Olbinski encountered that he used in "Shadows In The Sky"had sub-optimal light and surroundings. You can't expect every storm to do the work for you.
But the photo editing made those problems disappear without compromising the reality of the storms. Nothing looks fake here. That he is Arizona based helps, too, as he captures some awesome desert microbursts and haboobs.
The music adds to the emotional mix of apprehension, awe, foreboding and excitement Olbinski's time lapses offer. And it builds to a surprisingly satisfying crescendo.
Weather geeks like myself of course will want to watch"Shadows In The Sky" repeatedly. I also encourage people who are not the least bit interested in the weather to check it out. If you like photography and art and fascinating video, this is the required viewing.
I feel sorry for people who never pay attention to the sky, the clouds, the heavens. Olbinski is creating converts to the happy club of people who are in awe of what nature can create when it is in a stormy mood.
As promised, we're back to full blown spring here in Vermont after our bout with late season winter.
For me, it was back to doing garden work yesterday here in St. Albans, Vermont on a cool, breezy, but pleasant evening. That involved assessing the damage from the snow and freeze. I found that plants can be nice and resilient.
A series of photos in this post depict our journey in St Albans from spring to winter and back to spring.
What saved many garden plants around much of Vermont was for most of us, temperatures stayed at or above 25 degrees.
It felt colder with the wind chill, but wind chill is for us humans. The snow hurt by crushing tender flowers and stems, but also helped by burying leaves and sprouts to protect them from the cold.
It's still not perfectly clear yet what died and what survived, but for most plants, they're good.
2:32 p.m. April 21, the burying begins.
The most disappointing result I've seen is that although all those daffodils around my house survived and continued to bloom, they got mushed down and are now not as pretty and well-arranged as they were.
Some flower stems failed under the weight of the snow, so the flowers drooped to the ground and are dying.
The forsythia flowers, a brilliant yellow before the storm, are now brown and dead, but the new leaves sprouting on that bush look fine. The leaves on the day lily plants are flattened but will perk up as spring progresses.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the lilacs. The budding flowers drooped and took on a darker, brownish color in the freeze, making me think they died and we'll have to wait another full year for the glory of the lilacs.
However, the flower buds seemed to perk up in Friday's sunshine, so maybe they survived. We'll see how they do in the next few weeks.
4:31 p.m April 21 The snow keeps flying
Thank goodness we don't have much more cold weather to talk about. Today will be sort of warm for the season with highs up into the 60s.
Sunday will bring less rain than originally expected, but there will be showers around under seasonably cool conditions.
The dreaded "S" word comes back late Sunday night and early Monday, but relax, it will be no big deal. There might be a few wet snow flakes in the air in the hours either side of dawn Monday, but it won't amount to anything.
Monday will be close to 10 degrees colder than average, but that means highs will be near 50 degrees. That's not too bad. Temperatures will be near freezing Monday night, but again, not cold enough to cause any further plant damage.
The weather for the rest of the upcoming week looks fairly uncertain, but it will be a little warmer than average, and expect some late April showers here and there.
Continue to scroll down to see our climb out of the winter blast and back into spring. It's satisfying to see.
8:54 a.m. April 22. The depths of winter. Temperatures were around 27 degrees when this photo was taken.
7:31 p.m. April 22. The snow hung on stubbornly all day but do the warm colors of that sunset portend better times ahead?
7:13 a.m Friday, April 23. It feels a bit warmer and look at that blue sky headed our way. Hope?
9:56 a.m. Friday, April 23. The sun begins to do its work
12:25 p.m. April 23. Almost there!
2:32 p.m. April 23 The daffodils are looking a little battered, but back to full on spring!
A truck collects maple sap gathered in St. Albans, Vermont this past March 21. The sugaring season was lackluster due mostly to early bouts of unseasonably warm weather.
The recent bout of winter weather in Vermont notwithstanding, a very warm, very early spring really screwed up our all-important maple sugaring season.
A much-too-premature bout of 70 degree weather in March plus low sugar content in the maple sap are to blame for the lackluster yield.
Vermont's maple sugar harvest usually runs from late February into April. Record warmth from March 23 to 26 brought a premature ending to season, especially for producers in the warmer valleys of the Green Mountain State.
In northeastern Vermont and in some higher elevations, where the sugaring season often lasts well into April, a long spell of more record and near record warmth between April 8 and 14 put the kibosh on the season.
Though yields were down this year, it doesn't look like there will be a maple supply shortage. The Vermont Maple Sugar Makers' Association says one off year won't mess up supplies. If we have several bad years in a row, then it becomes a problem.
Vermont is by far the nation's leading maple producer. We normally produce about 2 million gallons of syrup, which makes up more than half of all U.S. production.
Climate change is disrupting and altering Vermont's famed sugaring season. The Proctor Maple Research Center says sugaring season starts 8.3 days earlier and ends 11.6 days earlier than it did five decades ago.
The season also tends to end earlier than it once did. Though there have been some great maple yields in recent years, there have been a disturbing recent few years, like this one, in which erratic weather disrupted the season.
