Odd Quiet Weather Pattern This Week Producing Fog, Pollution

Aftermath of a pileup on Interstate 64 in Virginia this morning.
Fog lifted after the crash. But dense fog and ice contributed
to this crash. 

The eastern two-thirds of the United States is still oddly quiet in the weather department.

Great for travel, but not so great for air quality. Or the production of fog.

The storminess we usually see this time of year mixes the air. Strong winds dissipate and blow away any emissions we produce and most of the fog that tries to form in moist air.

But high pressure is dominating this week, so the air is relatively still. When high pressure, fair weather systems dominate in the summer, you can get pollution problems too. But the strong sun of summer mixes the air, so that helps dissipate fog and pollution.

Around now, the winter solstice, the sun is weak, of course. So you don't get the updrafts caused by the sun's heating, and the air doesn't mix. In fact, an inversion often forms, in which the air above is warmer than the air at the surface. That locks in the air, not allowing fog and pollution to escape.

That's why it's hazy from the Plains through the Midwest to the East Coast this weekend. I noticed this while flying from Burlington, Vermont to Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Saturday. During a stopover in Chicago, it was actually kind of smoggy.

As my plane took off from O'Hare, you can see a brown smudge enveloping the air over the Windy City, which was anything but windy on Saturday.

Some places are worse than others. There's an air quality alert in southwestern New Hampshire, as air pollution is accumulating in low elevations there.

Elswhere, dense fog advisories were up for large parts of the central Plains this morning. Where I am this morning in Yankton, South Dakota, the sun is out, but you can see haze accumulating in the atmosphere.

Sometimes, this situation can get dangerous. Fog can get thick, and in the winter, the moisture from the fog can ice up bridges and highways. Motorists start sliding on the ice, and can't see each other in the dense fog.

Such was the case early this morning in Virginia. Dense fog and ice contributed to a 45-car pileup on I-64  and many people are injured, according to Virgina State Police.

Weather conditions will slowly begin to get more active on and after Christmas, so the haze and fog will start to decline, only to be replaced by our usual winter hazards of snow and ice, at least in some parts of the country.

For Those Challenged By Winter, These People Are Doing Worse Than You

Don't shovel snow off your roof like this guy.  

Winter is certainly a challenge.

As the video in this post shows, some people manage winter worse than others.

If you're in New England, you might want to take the nine minutes to watch the video, in order to distract you from your sore back from shoveling, the lack of a view out your window because of the snowbanks pressed against it, and from the lack of hope that spring will ever arrive.

A couple of observations about the video before we get into it:

People really don't have much of an appreciation for thin ice, do they?

I feel really sorry for the pig on ice you see in the video. And for the toddler in the pink snowsuit who  discovers ice, and then its drawbacks.

And I really feel sorry for the guy in front of the brick building, around seven minutes in, who tries to get out of his car.

For your viewing pleasure, here's what's wrong with winter:

Vermont Snow Biggest Disaster For Utilities Since Irene Or '98 Ice

Crews try to restore power amid heavy, wet snow near
Waterbury, Vermont. Photo by Wilson Ring, AP 

My home state of Vermont is suffering from something of a weather disaster that has mostly escaped the attention the national media.

This disaster is mostly associated with power failures that have gone on and one due to heavy wet snow.

It's not like California this week with a lot of property damage. Here in Vermont, nobody has been killed or seriously injured that I know of so far, and only a handful of homes have suffered minor damage here in the Green Mountain State.

But the power failures! They started Tuesday when the storm hit, and from late Tuesday on through early Friday, there were consistently more than 20,000 homes and businesses without power in Vermont.

That number had fallen to just under 13,000 by early Saturday morning, according to Vermont Outage Map. However, some of the state's utilities say it will be until next week before everybody has their electricity flowing.

Utilities say this is their worst storm since the epic ice storm of January, 1998 or the devastation from the Hurricane Irene floods of 2011. 

That, of course is a disaster for the people without power, huddling in cold homes, not being able to run their furnaces, water pumps, Internet connections and everything else for days.

This storm also caused on Wednesday one of the biggest traffic fiascos I've ever seen.

It might seem odd to outsiders that Vermont is suffering from a snowstorm.  We only got 6 to 20 inches of snow during the main part of the storm. Aren't we used to getting a foot or more of snow routinely during winter storms? What gives now?

The problem is the consistency of the snow this time around. Usually, when it snows hard in Vermont, it's all light and powdery. The slightest breeze knocks this powdery snow off of trees and powerlines, and the electricity keeps humming to the lights, the refrigerator the furnace, and the television set that's airing "How The Grinch Stole Christmas."

This time, the snow was extremely wet and heavy, and at times mixed with sleet and freezing rain. The temperature hovered right near 32 degrees as the glop kept pouring from the sky. It stuck fast to trees, which bent and broke over the power lines all over the state.

The heart of the storm lasted nearly two days, which is longer than normal for a Vermont snowstorm, so this kept coming.

On Wednesday afternoon, a heavier band of soggy snow swept across Vermont just as the evening commute got under way. In Chittenden County, the state's most heavily populated area, the fast falling snow caught everyone as they were getting out of work.

Just as it is with power lines, wet snow is harder to deal with on the roads than the powdery stuff we usually get.  The powder usually partly blows off the roads, and isn't quite as slippery as the wet stuff.

Car tires compact wet snow into an exceptionally slick hard pack of ice. A bit of water on this hard pack makes it all the more slippery.

So, on Wednesday, cars with bad tires got stuck on even the slightest hills all around the region. Other vehicles got trapped behind the stuck cars. What for many is normally, say, 20 minute commute home from work took more than two hours.

The local bus service abruptly suspended service amid the chaos, so people walked several miles home. In many areas, traffic signals weren't working due to power failures.

In more rural areas, dozens or hundreds of trees and branches fell onto snow covered roads and highways. It took forever to get crews to cut up all the fallen trees on the road, then remove the snow. Some roads were blocked for a better part of a day due to fallen trees or car accidents.

Another thing that made this utility snow disaster worse is the weather after the heaviest snow ended Wednesday night.

The remnants of the storm have stalled nearby, and occasional wet snow has continued since. There hasn't been any sun to melt some of the snow and ice off trees and power lines. The continued light snow is the straw that broke the camel's back, if you will.

Trees and power lines that were tottering on the edge of collapsing under the weight of the mashed potato snow finally did fail when just a little more slush accumulated on them.

So the utilities would repair some lines, get the electricity flowing in one neighborhood, only to have trees collapse a couple miles down the road, putting more people in the dark. This has happened over, and over, and over, and OVER again since Wednesday.

Some of my friends at work said they'd get power for a few hours, it would go as another tree branch fell down the road, then it would come back, go, etc. etc.

Utilities have been working around the clock to restore power, so the crews must be exhausted. Vermont's largest utility, Green Mountain Power, has called in help from Massachusetts and Maine to help restore power.

I'm hoping people who are running generators don't get carbon monoxide poisoning in the meantime. I also hope nobody gets hurt with all the chainsaws buzzing amid the icy conditions out there, and nobody gets a heart attack from shoveling all this heavy stuff. So far, so good.

This storm hasn't been all bad in Vermont, of course. The thick layer of heavy snow has helped establish a very nice base for the ski areas, which will last all winter unless we get a mega-thaw.

Continued snow since Wednesday in the mountains has been piling up at a rate of two to six inches a day. This sets the ski areas up for a potentially awesome Christmas vacation season. (The power will have been fully restored by then, so if you were planning to come to Vermont to ski during Christmas break, by all means do so.)

Cross country skiing and snowshoeing is awesome in addition to the skiing. And the thick accumulation of snow on every tree branch has turned much of Vermont into a gorgeous winter wonderland.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. The snow is expected to end today, and the sun will finally come out, at least part of the time, later today and especially Sunday.

That would melt some of the snow off the trees and power lines, especially as temperatures rise into the mid-30s on Sunday.

Though more power failures might occur as trees snap back into their normal positions as they dump their loads of snow, at least the heavy snow will be off of them. Then the utilities can finish their arduous task of restoring power to all of us.