Springlike Christmas Season To End As Winter Reasserts Itself

My back yard, St. Albans, Vermont, buried
beneath 15 inches of wet snow on Dec. 13.  

The temperature has been continuously above freezing in normally wintry Burlington, Vermont since early Tuesday morning and won't get below freezing again until Sunday afternoon or evening.

That's a remarkably long thaw for this time of year, especially considering the normal high temperature at the end of December is around 30 degrees.

It's also remarkable that less than two weeks ago I had a thick 15 inch cover of heavy wet snow on m property in St. Albans, Vermont.

Yesterday, I was able to get to some autumn lawn raking I didn't get to back in November. Yep, the snow is pretty much gone.

But winter is about to make its inevitable comeback here, and in the rest of the country, and in other parts of the northern hemisphere as well.

Winter is already firmly entrenched in some parts of the country. It's in the single numbers, with even some below zero readings noted in the Northern Plains this morning. That's not particularly remarkable for this time of year, but it's certainly winter.

Much of California and Arizona is under freeze and frost warnings as a cold wave has settled in there.

The chilly weather is spreading across the nation, and by the time New Year's Eve rolls around the entire contiguous lower 48 United States will be colder than normal, or at least near normal in a few spots.

Yesterday, less than two weeks after the above photo
of my snow-buried back yard in St. Albans, Vermont,
I was raking leaves on that very same lawn. Big thaw, no?

Luckily, this cold snap isn't like some of the ones we had last winter, the one where "polar vortex" became part of the weather vernacular.
I see few if any daily record lows being set anywhere in the country during this cold wave, except maybe a few in the desert Southwest.

It looks like repeated cold shots will come into the nation well into January. But that's fairly typical of any winter.

Unlike the unrelenting cold in the eastern two thirds of the nation last winter, the cold waves will come to any one location, last a couple days, and then it will warm up, then it will turn frigid again.

Rinse and repeat.

The most interesting weather over the next several days might be a nasty snowstorm that develops in the mountains of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.  Given the cold snap under way in that portion of the country, snow might fall even in the lower desert valleys.

Las Vegas, Nevada will probably go below freezing in the next few days, ending a record streak. As of today, there have been 379 consecutive days there where the temperature has never gotten below freezing. The only record of 378 days was in 2012.

Las Vegas will also have its latest first freeze of the season on record. The old record date was December 20 2012.

Winter is moving into Europe, too. A sizeable chunk of the United Kingdom is struggling with icy, snowy roads after what had been a mild start to the winter.

Some long range models for a week or so down the road bring snow to a lot of areas around the Mediterranean Sea, too.

We're getting into January. It's winter. We'll have to get used to it for awhile.