Wintry Rest Of The Weekend For Vermont, Much Of Rest Of Nation

This is just one model of the potential storm on Sunday and Monday.
This run of the European model dumps a foot and a half of snow
on the Albany, New York Capital District and interior southern
New England. CAUTION: This is just one run and one model. I pretty much
guarantee the storm won't play out like this, but it gives an idea of
where the early thinking of where the storm might focus. Note
that it could go further north or south than this, or be stronger
or weaker than this.  Time will tell.

The well-heralded second, stronger storm of the Thanksgiving week is gathering strength this morning over the western half of the nation as part of a coast-to-coast ride that is providin and will continue to provide lots of ugly weather for most of the nation.

 It's a wide ranging, large storm, so almost everybody gets in on the action. 

After coming ashore in Oregon the other day as a powerful, deep windstorm, this one settled into the Southwest on Thanksgiving, dropping lots of rain, firing up strong thunderstorms and flash floods in southern California and Arizona.

There was even a tornado warning early this morning for parts of the Phoenix metro area.

This storm is also dumping boatloads of snow in higher elevations. Some snow even came down in not-so-high elevations.

Interstate 5 - The so called Grapevine in the mountains east of Los Angeles, shut down yesterday due to heavy snow and many stuck cars.

The storm is gathering itself, and will cause major trouble today and tomorrow through a huge area of the western and central United States.

Winter storm and blizzard warnings extend from Arizona, through the central Rockies and into a big, big portion of the northern Plains.

To its south, severe weather and possible tornadoes could break out in and around Louisiana Saturday.

This type of storm track usually has the action going by to our west and we Vermonters get a squirt of warm air ahead of the storm before the inevitable cold front with the storm comes through.

Not this time. The storm will take an unusual path. Instead of continuing on toward the Great Lakes, it seems the storm will take an abrupt right turn once it gets to about Nebraska. Then it will head east or even a little south of east  toward the Mid-Atlantic coast, where a new storm will develop, and turn into a pretty typical nor'easter.

There will be a nasty stripe of snow and ice north of the storm's path. It's not a fast mover, either, so there could be time to drop a lot of precipitation where it concentrates itself. 

It's unclear how far north the snow will get given the storm's kind of strange path Southern and central New England have the potential at least to get quite a dump.

Here in Vermont, the south could get a lot and the north would largely miss out.  Computer trends with this storm have trended a bit south, so if that prediction sticks, northern Vermont would only get a little snow Sunday night and Monday.

But, that's no guarantee.  If the storm jogs just a little north, the whole state could get a good dump of snow out of this. No promises yet either way.

OTHER ISSUES

Before we get to that, note that there's areas of freezing drizzle in Vermont this morning. If you've headed out to the silly Black Friday store buster deals, don't hurry too much. Roads are slick in spots.

Plus, whether or not we get snow in Vermont later Sunday into Monday, it's going to be wintry cold again. After a brief break in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, we're stuck back in the early start to winter.   It's going to be a long one, folks.