Earlly Wintry Blast Means Strong Winds, Remarkably Chilly Days

A windy, chillyday with snowcapped mountains in tbe background
along Lake Champlain in Charlotte Vermont in October, 2016. Over the next
several days, it will be even chillier than the day depicted in this photo/

The weather pattern across much of the United States is remarkably wintry for mid-October.

For many, including us here in Vermont, that means gusty winds and a smattering of December like days strewn in with the lingering foliage.

The first good cold front of this weather regime was surprisingly windy overnight here in the North Country.

Forecasters had anticipated gusts well over 30 mph, with winds even stronger across northern New Hampshire and much of Maine.

Vermont definitely got into the windy act overnight, and the result was more than 8,000 homes and businesses without power across the state as of 7 a.m. or so.

Winds aloft were screaming out of the west, and some of that mixed down to the surface. The mountain tops really got blasted. The summit of Mount Mansfield gusted to 89 mph, and up on Whiteface Mountain, New York, it got up to 79 mph.

At slightly lower elevations, where most of us live, the winds were gusty enough to bring down a lot of trees, branches and power lines. Brookfield and Wells gusted to 54 mph and Montpelier reached 48 mph. Many, many places gusted past 40 mph.

The wind will gradually diminish during the course of the day, but we are stuck in that wintry pattern for the next week or week and a half or so. That means several cold fronts from the northwest. None will have much precipitation, but we'll have light rain and snow showers every couple of days.

Some cold fronts will bring incredibly cold air for this time of year. It'll generally stay windy, though not as gusty as last night. The winds will hold temperatures sort of, kind of, up at nights. We'll have a fair number of nights that get down into the 20s, but that's not totally out of whack for this time of year.

A few afternoons will be downright December-like, though. Thursday's highs will only get into the 30s, which will challenge record low maximum temperatures for the date. We'll just start to warm up Friday when another cold front will plunge us back into a taste of early winter for the upcoming weekend.

Snow has been falling in weird places, and not falling in places where it should. It snowed as far south as northern Texas yesterday. Meanwhile, no measurable snow has yet fallen  in normally frigid Fairbanks, Alaska.  Their first measurement snow, on average, is around September 27.

Overall, snowcover across North America is well above normal for this time of year. It's uncertain, but the Weather Channel posits that all this early snow, mostly in Canada, could create a pool of particularly cold air in that country. If that happens, we in the United States, especially the Great Lakes and Northeast, would be prone to more frequent and more harsh winter cold waves than usual.

That idea is not cast in stone, but it definitely could happen.

I'm not done with fall cleanup, not by a long shot. So let's all hope for some sort of Indian Summer in November. Could happen, right?