Most Insane Part Of Arctic Blast Is Today, Relief Coming, I Promise

Early this morning, I took the dogs outside to do their business at my St. Albans, Vermont house.

Flooding, ice chumks, debris, stuck cars and snow
remained Friday in coastal Massachusetts, still
recovering from the nor'easter and near record storm
surge and now, bitter cold. 

Needless to say, Jackson and Tonks did NOT stay out long, not with a roaring wind, blowing snow, subzero temperatures and a wind chill in the minus 30s.

I even had trouble closing the door when I got the dogs inside. Blowing snow was getting into the door jam and freezing. It's that bad.

Yes, here in Vermont and the rest of the Northeast, today is insane, no two ways about it. And we're tired of it. Aside from a rather poor excuse for a break in the cold this past Wednesday, we've endured this since December 26 - nearly two weeks.

The end of this Arctic siege is coming though. It will very likely be a temporary end, as it's still early winter, but we'll take it.

As we keep saying, you want to be super careful today in northern New England, much of the rest of the Northeast and southeastern Canada. Don't go outside if you don't have to, and if you do, cover up everything. Skin can easily freeze in less than a minute in these conditions.

Check on your elderly neighbors, too, They can get in trouble quickly in this weather. They can have problems with heat, or busted pipes or something else. Make sure they're warm and safe.

By the way, there's been a lot of nonsense online and in the media as to whether this cold snap and big nor'easter is a sign there's no global warming, or that climate change is entirely to blame. Look for a reality check on this ridiculous jabber in the next day or two.

Here in Vermont, temperatures will stay below zero all day. If Burlington, Vermont stays below zero all day today, which is highly likely, it'll be the first time that's happened since January 22, 2014. (It used to happen pretty much every year, but winters have generally gotten a little warmer.)

The wind will continue to crank all day, too. So there will be little, if any improvement from this morning's conditions.

The news for tonight is a mixed bag. On the plus side, the National Weather Service has backed away a bit from what they expect to be cold overnight lows. Instead of 20s to upper 30s below zero, depending on your location, we're now looking at something like 15 to 30 below. Vaguely better.

But that's because the wind will keep going for a good part of the night, keeping the atmosphere mixed and interfering with radiation of what little heat there is out to space. The wind will die down before dawn, and that's when temperatures will really plunge. Exactly how cold it gets where you are depends upon how early the wind dies down. The earlier the calm winds arrive, the colder it will get, generally speaking.

Temperatures will start to warm late Sunday morning and afternoon but you probably won't notice it. When a cold snap like this one ends in Vermont, I like to say it "warms up cold" especially in the Champlain Valley.

What happens is, the temperature indeed rises. But as the warmer air begins to flood in, strong southerly winds also arrive, most noticeably in the Champlain Valley.  That means wind chills become an issue again.

Sunday, then, won't be a nice day. There will also be a lot of blowing snow around. Remember, the wind Sunday will be coming from the opposite direction as it has for the past two days. That means snow that blew into protected areas will blow around again. Look for snowy, icy patches on roads, drifts and areas of poor visiblity.

It's going to snow again, too, on Sunday night and Monday. Not much. We're looking at one to three inches most places.

By Monday afternoon, however, the warm air will have flooded in. Look for temperatures somewhere in the 25 to 35 degree range Monday. That's above zero, my friends.

If the temperature rises above freezing in Burlington Monday, that would mean we spent 15 consecutive days below freezing. That's not an amazing record, though. That would tie us for the 63rd longest continuous stretch below freezing. The record is 52 days, during the tough winter of 1976-77.

Another cold front will come through Tuesday, but don't worry, this next cold front is really lame. You really won't even notice it. High temperatures Tuesday will be near 32 degrees and "cool" into the 20s Wednesday. Not bad.

Toward the end of the week - Thursday and Friday - we could genuinely get into some thaw conditions in Vermont, with temperatures possibly in the 30s to low 40s during the day. The only problem is mixed precipitation or even rain is a good bet on those days.

Even if there's plain rain, it's been so cold lately that the ground temperatures are frigid. Say it's 38 degrees and raining Thursday afternoon. We'd still be getting freezing rain because the precipitation would likely freeze on contact with pavement. But at least it will be warmer!

This pattern change is good news, though, for most of the country. The eastern half of the nation has been in a deep freeze for so long now. This new weather pattern will keep almost the entire nation warm.

It also has been scarily dry in California this winter. Wildfires lasted into the end of December, which is unprecedented. This new weather pattern makes rainstorms and mountain snowstorms a very good bet for all of California in the upcoming week or two. They only drawback to the California rains is that, starting Monday, locally heavy rains will cause potentially dangerous debris flows in the vast areas hit by wildfires between August and December.

This warmer, and for California, wetter pattern looks like it will last at least into the third week of January. (We'll get brief cold spells here in Vermont, but nothing extreme.) Who knows, though, what we'll deal with in late January and February? At least we're getting a break, though.