Entertaining Weather Videos On A Slow Weather Day

Clear skies in the Northeast Friday allowed a great view of where snow
was on the ground, where it wasn't, what was frozen, what not.
Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to see details.

Things have temporarily gotten slow in the weather department, but don't worry, things will be pretty active around here by the middle and end of the week.

While we have some quiet weather moments, some goofy weather videos to share. And a photo.

The photo on the right is a satellite shot taken amid unusually clear skies in the eastern United States on Friday.  Click on it to make it bigger and easier to see the details of the current state of the winter.

The snow cover in New England ends just over the Massachusetts border from Vermont and New Hampshire. The Great Lakes are remarkably ice-free for late February. Even the Finger Lakes in New York aren't frozen.

You can also see that a large section of Lake Champlain is also free of ice. It almost certainly will not completely freeze over this year.  We have a few warm days coming. Even if it turns cold in March, the increasing sun angle would help erode new ice that forms at night.

Down in eastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, you can also see an area of snow on the ground from a small storm the day before.  By the end of the day yesterday, that snow in the Southeast was mostly gone.

The clouds off the New England and Mid-Atlantic coasts are caused by cold air blowing over the relatively warm waters of the Atlantic.  There were even a few ocean-effect snow flurries from these clouds Friday morning on Cape Cod.

Now some videos:

This one has been billed as a "carbon neutral way to prevent ice dams:"



Next up, stupidity of the day.  We see this all the time. People drive right into floodwaters, not knowing how deep it is, not caring how dangerous it is.  A lot of it is stupidity.

There's still a lot of flooding going in in England due to two immense storms over the past couple weeks.  Here, we see rescuers in elaborate safety gear with boats heading out to retrieve residents from obviously deep floodwater in one neighborhood.

You and I wouldn't drive down that flooded street, right? The turbulent water and the rescue crews would seem like dead giveaways not to proceed.  Not everybody thinks like that. Watch the rescuers shake their heads in disbelief:



In Michigan, volcanoes have been erupting last week.  Don't worry, no lava in Detroit, no pyroclastic flows in Ann Arbor. Instead, ice has piled up on the windy shores of Lake Michigan.  More waves pounding in get under the ice and water pressure creates these "ice volcanoes."  They're pretty cool:



Also, in Michigan, another icy phenomenon.  A curving current in a small river created a rotating ice disk, much like that larger, more famous one that formed in Maine last year.  Here's the mesmerizing Michigan ice disk:

Quiet, Cloudy Weather Day Saturday, But Really Cool, Strange Satellite Imagery

Most of Saturday was cloudier than expected, especially over northern Vermont.

While the view of the clouds from the ground was kind of dull and gray, fascinating stuff became apparent on satellite imagery, especially for those of us who are weather geeks.

The satellite photo of the clouds is in this post for your reference.  It's a little hard to see what I'm talking about, so click on the photo to make it bigger and easier to discern.

So here's the set up: An incoming large high pressure system trapped moisture in some of the lower layers of the atmosphere. Usually, in the warmer seasons at least, uneven heating helps mix drier air downward from up above, and the clouds dissipate. 

The high pressure was too strong to allow much of that mixing to happen during most of the day, so we were stuck under the clouds that were only about 1,000 feet thick. But thick enough to block out the sun.

In a way, this could be a sign of the season. In the winter, when the sun is much weaker and lower, the heat doesn't make it through the clouds to mix the atmosphere to ultimate chew up the clouds.

That's a big reason why it's so often overcast in Vermont during the winter, especially between November and January, when the sun is lowest.

Perhaps the sun would have broken through earlier Saturday afternoon if it were June or July, not August, when the sun is beginning to wane.

Now, the really cool part of this satellite image is that very narrow band of clear skies, stretching southeastward in the satellite photo from around Montreal into north central Vermont near Jay Peak and on into the Northeast Kingdom. After this photo was taken, the narrow clear line continued moving southwestward and broadened a little bit.

Also note the clouds seem a little thicker than elsewhere just to the west of that clearing band.

I asked for help from the National Weather Service in South Burlington and as always, they got back to me right away with an explanation. I'll do my best here to relay what they told me.

At the time the satellite photo was taken, a weak weather boundary was moving southwestward from eastern Quebec. It was essentially a mini, weak cold front.

A "dry slot" of mostly clear skies behind a cold front is seen in eastern Nebraska,
Kansas and Oklahoma in this old satellite photo.

As the cold front approached, it provided a little lift into the atmosphere. The lift encouraged more cloudiness, which is why those clouds were thicker just to the southwest of that skinny clear line.

Behind this "front," there air sinks. The boundary was basically like a wave coming ashore at a beach. As the wave comes in, the water rises, than falls again as the wave passes. Behind this boundary in northern Vermont, the air was sinking.

Sinking air can warm the atmosphere and that is often death to clouds.  That's probably why there was that narrow band of clear skies. Once that narrow air of sinking air passed, the moisture in the atmosphere was able to reassert itself, and the clouds once again formed in the far Northeast Kingdom and southeastern Quebec.

You see this kind of thing on a much larger scale with strong cold fronts, especially in the late autumn, winter and early spring. These much bigger versions of what we saw in that Vermont satellite photo are usually associated with strong storm systems, not weak, tiny little things that we had affecting us.

Lift ahead of these big cold fronts can often create a solid band of showers and thunderstorms. Behind the front, the air sinks, and you get a band of mostly clear skies known as a "dry slot."

As the narrow line of clear skies continued southwestward across Vermont during the mid-afternoon, it gradually widened, then the clouds over the entire region broke apart. The August sun finally did it's job, mixing the air and melting away that overcast. It was a gorgeous late afternoon and evening.

Weather Geek Out: Time Lapse Satellite View Of Hurricane Season

This isn't an image from the video at the bottom of this post, but you get the
idea. The ebb and flow of Atlantic hurricanes is a sight to behold.

NOAA recently put out a time lapse satellite view of the Atlantic Ocean in which you can watch the progress of all the tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin during 2018.

That's the point of the video, anyway.

But it's mesmerizing to watch the flow of clouds across much of North America, the Atlantic and extreme western Europe. The air really acts like a fluid.

A time stamp in the upper right hand corner tells you what time of year you're in. Early in the video, clusters of thunderstorms keep popping up in the Plains, like premature Fourth of July fireworks. That's typical of that time of year.

The hurricane season got off to a slow start. You can see why. A milky haze is seen coming off the west coast of Africa in July. That's dust from the Sahara Desert, which helps suppress tropical storms.

At roughly the same time, you see a conveyor belt of clouds repeated moving northward along the United States East Coast, contributing to a record wet year in the Mid-Atlantic states

Later, when the Sahara dust diminishes,  you see Hurricane Florence making its long journey across the Atlantic Ocean toward North Carolina. You see how Florence moved in fits and starts, organizing, weakening, starting to head north, then changing its mind and beelining toward North Carolina.

Powerful hurricane Michael looks almost like an afterthought on satellite. It was a terribly powerful, destructive storm, but in the grand scheme of things, didn't have a particularly long life. At the same time that Michael was raising havoc, Leslie in the central Atlantic danced and swirled around aimlessly seemingly endlessly looping around out there before finally giving up the ghost and heading toward Portugal.

Even if you're not into weather like I am, the video is worth watching. In a stressful time of year, the ebb and flow of the clouds in the video is soothing. Which is ironic, since hurricanes are anything but soothing.

So here's the video. Enjoy!

Believe It Or Not, A Dust Storm In Greenland

Satellite view of a dust storm in Greenland of all places. Yep, they
can happen there and it's NOT global warming

We all think of Greenland as an incredible cold, forbidding place. It's basically an enormous pile of ice.

But as the Weather Channel points out, you can actually get dust storms up there. A satellite passing overhead recently took a photo of one.

These dust storms aren't anything huge like you see in the Desert Southwest or near the Sahara Desert or something like that. But they do get cranking up in Greenland.

They get going close to the coast, where snow and ice usually melt away during the summer.

Here's how it all happens:

Water from melting glaciers flows into a flood plain, then either recedes or evaporates. The sediment left behind consists of a very fine powder called glacial flour, which is created by the grinding of glaciers and pulverizing rock.

When the glacial flour dries out, strong winds can send it airborne, creating these far northern dust storms.

Unlike seemingly everything else that goes on in Greenland, which seems to be the go-to bellwether for climate change, the dust storms have nothing to do with global warming.

These little Greenland dust storms have been reported over many decades. Satellite photos rarely capture them because it's usually too cloudy to see them. This time, the skies cleared and the satellite got a nice shot of this dust storm.

Snow Be Gone: Satellite Shows Aftermath Of Vermont Spring Snow

A visible satellite photo taken Wednesday morning clearly
shows a stripe of snow on the ground through the Adirondacks,
central Vermont and New Hampshire. 

I was chilly working in a client's South Burlington, Vermont garden yesterday as a rather harsh late April cold snap continues.

While I worked, patches of snow lingered in the shade, a full two days after a two inch snowfall hit the area.

Much of Vermont got one to four inches of late season snow Tuesday.

Temperatures did get into the upper 40s the past couple of days, but the air was dry. When it's that dry, snow doesn't melt readily in areas that are shaded.

Besides, it should actually be in the low 60s this time of year. That snow should have melted much sooner, had things been normal.

Heck, it shouldn't have even snowed, but that's Vermont for you.

The National Weather Service in South Burlington shared a really cool satellite photo taken Wednesday morning over Vermont.

It's in this post. Click on it and make it bigger and easier to see.

To orient yourself, you can find Lake Champlain as the dark blue blotch near the upper center of the photograph.

You can clearly see the stripe of snow Tuesday's storm set down from the Adirondacks, through central Vermont and into New Hampshire.

By the time the photo was taken, the northern and southern edges of the snow cover had melted. In far northern Vermont, less snow fell, so it melted sooner. The more south you went, the snow mixed with rain, and further south, was just rain.

You also see the whiteness isn't as brilliant in the Champlain Valley as it is in the higher elevations of central Vermont and the Adirondacks of New York.

Less snow fell in the valley, and it was a little warmer there, so more of it was gone by the time the satellite snapped the photo Wednesday morning.

The satellite photo, though, really has a clear footprint of that snow, doesn't it?

It was another cold morning today, but some moderation in temperature is coming to Vermont Starting today.

Temperatures will rise into the 50s today and maybe touch 60 in a few spots Saturday. There's another freeze coming tonight, but we're used to that now.

Readings will be only slightly cooler than normal going into next week, so I guess that's an improvement over what we had this week.

Off and on precipitation is due much of next week, but this time, it will come all in the form of rain.

That won't create any more really cool visible satellite photos of Vermont, but that's surely OK by me!

Watch All Of The World's 2015 Weather In One Very Cool Video

A still from a video of satellite imagery showing
the world's weathe in 2015.

Meterologists put together a really cool video taken from geostationary satellites that show how the weather evolved across the globe during 2015.

The video is a compilation of geostationary satellities operated by EUMETSAT, the Japan Meteorological Society and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Mark Higgins, Training Manager at EUMETSAT narrates the video, pointing out highlighs such as the numeous cyclones and typhoons that formed in the eastern Pacific and Indian oceans and the seasonal transitions from large extratropical storms to thunderstorms in the northern hemisphere.

He also points out features like hurricane Joaquin, which then raced across the Atlantic Ocean as a strong non-tropical storm that unleashed floods in Europe.

It's a cool video to watch, if only to enjoy the steady flow of clouds and weather systems as they make their way around the world. It's like watching a well-tuned machine at work.

Even if under the clouds depicted in this "well-tuned machine"there's sometimes a chaos of wind and rain and blizzards and other dangerous weather.

 Here's the video:

"Perfect" Hurricane Pops Up On Beautiful Satellite Photo

Hurricanes Jiminez, to the right, and Ignacio, to the left
closer to Hawaii.  n

This week, an unprecedented three major hurricanes co-existed with each other in the central and eastern Pacific.

In this post, click on the satellite photo to make it bigger and easier to see. The hurricane to the right is Jimena It has to be the most perfectly formed hurricane I've ever seen in a satellite photo.

Too bad hurricanes can be so deadly. Otherwise, at least from space they are among the most beautiful weather phenomenon you will ever see.

The other hurricane in the photo, northeast of Hawaii, is Ignacio, which gave rough weather to the easternmost islands in the Hawaii chain yesterday.

Hurricane Jimina is expected to turn north and weaken over the next few days. It will miss Hawaii.

Awesome Satellite View of Spring Snow Melt In Vermont/Northern New York.

On April 12 in this screen shot from a NWS Burlington
Vermont video, a satellite image shows bare
ground in the Champlain Valley and ice breaking up
in Lake Champlain, but much of the rest of the
region still buried under snow and ice.  n

The National Weather Service in Burlington, Vermont today released a cool video showing the progression of early spring over most of Vermont, Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks of New York.

The view is via NOAA's MODIS visible satellite images, which can get down to pretty good detail in a relatively small area, like Vermont and northern New York.

The National Weather Service put images April 1, 12, 15 and 19 up in the video for comparison. They picked these days because skies were crystal clear, so no clouds were in the way of the view.

On April 1, everything is covered in snow except for a few evident bare patches in parts of the Champlain Valley.

By April 12, all of the Champlain Valley is clear of snow and ice is beginning to break up on Lake Champlain. Pretty much everyone else is snow covered. Things progress to Sunday, April 19, with snow only in the highest elevations, and no ice on Lake Champlain.

Things are beginning to backslide a little bit, temporarily of course.  Snow and sleet fell for a time this morning at mid and high elevations of New York and Vermont, though that had mostly changed to rain showers region wide by noon today.

Later this week and this weekend, a few inches of fresh snow might dust the mountains again as a chilly, unsettled spell of weather takes hold.

But soon enough, similar MODIS satellite images won't look so brown. Trees and fields will green up in another month or so, and the satellite images of Vermont on a clear day will be largely green instead of brown, as spring continues its unsteady advance toward the North Country.  

Here's the video:

Still patches of ice, snow in and near Lake Ontario.  

It's finally warmed up in the northeastern United States after a long, cold winter.

Snow is mostly gone, at least in the low elevations, lake ice is breaking up, buds are appearing, and daffodils are emerging from the ground.

Hat tip to Marshall Shepherd for the visibile satellite image he put out on Twitter showing Lake Ontario in New York amid yesterday's sunshine.

In the photo in this post (click on it to make it bigger and easier to see) Lake Ontario is almost ice free. Still, on the western shore, you can see an area of ice that hasn't melted yet. It was blown there by steady west winds.

Also, you still see a patch of snow on the Tug Hill Plateau. That's high ground east of Lake Ontario that tends to get the heaviest and most persistent lake effect snows earlier in the winter. Not all that lake effect snow has melted yet, apparently.

You can also see the brown color of the rest of the landscape. Things haven't greened up yet in this neck of the woods.

If we get another satellite photo of the same area in another month or so, the landscape will look largely green.

Cool Image: Nightime Satellite View of Massive North Atlantic Storm Fed By Wicked Jet Stream

From @livingearthapp on Twitter, here's a cool nightime satellite image of a massive storm swirling in the North Atlantic Tuesday night.

Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to see.

You can see the lights of western Europe, dawn breaking over Asia, and some of the lights of eastern North America peeking off to the left.

But the main story is that storm. You get big storms in the North Atlantic this time of year, so this is to be expected. But they are beautiful, aren't they?

Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to see.

H/T to Anthony Sagliani, @anthonywx on Twitter, for calling this to everyone's attention Tuesday night.

The storm is part of an incredibly fast jet stream that has developed across the North Atlantic, stretching from the northeastern United States all the way to Britain and Scandanavia.

This unusually fast jet stream is having a variety of interesting effects today. It helped strengthen what should have been a weak weather front crossing the Northeast this morning.

The jet pushed air away, making more air rise along the front, so a well defined blast of 1-3 inches of snow in just a couple hours fell in the New York City metro area during the rush hour. Boo! Hiss!

The heavy snow band was heading toward Boston at mid-morning.

Ahead of this front, some of the jet stream's screaming winds have mixed down to the surface over parts of southeastern New England. Winds could gust as high as 65 mph over Cape Cod and the Islands today. 

It's even windy where I live, in the northwestern corner of Vermont. Winds are gusting to about 35 mph at my house this morning.

If you're in a hurry to get to Europe today, or wanted to get there fast yesterday, this screaming jet stream is a good thing.

The high upper level winds pushed airliners bound from the United States to Europe wicked fast. It usually takes a little over six hours to fly from New York to London.

But according to Mashable, British Airways Flight 114 bound from New York to London completed its journey in five hours and 16 minutes.  

A representation of the powerful jet stream
screaming across the North Atlantic this week.  

Other flights had similar fast trips.

Of course, heading from London to New York took longer than usual. You can't have everything.

The fast jet stream is contributing to the development of some strong, very windy storm in northwestern Europe, too.

The storminess, and the jet stream, is feeding off a strong contrast between low pressure to the north, and high pressure to the south. Northern parts of Great Britain, in particular, are caught in the pressure gradient between the north and south.

The Telegraph UK said one of the jet stream-fed storms struck Scotland last night, bringing winds of up to 113 mph to the town of Stornoway. That's the highest wind measured there since 1970.

There is some structural damage, widespread power failures and tree damage in much of Scotland, including in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

It was the same storm that you see in the satellite image at the top of this post.

Storms in Britain, and the jet stream, will calm down a bit over the coming days. But this is the season where you sometimes get especially powerful jet streams in the Northern Hemisphere.

Which is partly why it can get so damn stormy this time of year.

I guess we need to keep hanging on to our hats.

Really Awesome Satellite, Ground Photos Of A "Dry Slot"

From the National Weather Service in South Burlington, Vermont.
Abrupt clearing behind a cold front Wednesday morning.  

An unremarkable, weak cold front passed across northern New England on Wednesday.

Unremarkable, that is, until you see the satellite photos of it. And to a lesser extent, what it looked like from the ground.

Sometimes, a "dry slot" curls up behind a cold front associated with a storm system.

A dry slot is when a storm gets wound up, and the dry, cool air that usually comes in from the northwest behind a storm gets pulled northeastward and wraps itself into the east side of a storm

This actually happens a lot.  But the photos of yesterday's dry slot in northern New York and Vermont are pretty cool.

In this case, the boundary between wet air and dry air at mid-levels of the atmosphere was abrupt, so you got the sharp boundary between totally overcast skies and totally clear skies that we saw yesterday.

Photograph taken in St. Albans, in northwestern Vermont less than an hour
after the satellite photo, above, was taken. From the ground,
you can still see the sharp line between cloudy and clear.  

Dry slots don't usually last long in any one location.

Usually, moisture also wraps around a low pressure system, and continued winds from the northwest draw the wetness from the east, over the the northern top of the storm, then southeastward into areas that had initially been clear.

That's what happened in Vermont Wednesday. Skies cleared, it got fairly warm for this time of year.

The temperature in Burlington, Vermont reached 58 degrees under those briefly sunny skies within that dry slot.

That's eight degrees above normal. Nothing extreme, but nice for November.

But the clouds and cooler air began to filter in by mid to late afternoon, and the temperature slowly began to fall

By Thursday, northern New England was back into the typical November regime of clouds. cold rain, high elevation snow and generally blah weather.

That Typhoon Threatening Japan Is Incredible!

Satellite view of Typhoon Vongfong in
the western Pacific Ocean.  

Super Typhoon Vongfong became the strongest storm on Earth for 2014 yesterday and is the strongest storm since that terrible Haiyan that hit the Phillipines last November.

I'm always fascinated by the cloud structure of really strong tropical systems and Vongfong is no exception.

Click on the visible satellite photo of Vongfong in this post to make it bigger and easier to see.

You can see the striations in the clouds surrounding the eye of the storm. To me, it implies just an incredible whirl of wind around that eye.

No surprise, because estimated highest sustained winds with Vongfong are 180 mph.

Vongfong will probably threaten Japan by this weekend. It will have weakened by then, damaged by strong upper level winds and cooler sea temperatures near Japan that tend to make tropical systems peter out.

Still, it will be a formidable storm by the time it reaches Japan. They had another typhoon on Monday, so the ground is saturated. There will be wind and storm surge damage in Japan if Vongfong hits, but I think the worst threat is inland flooding.  It could get nasty.

Close up of the eye of Super Typhoon Vongfong
Not the intense swirl, and the little mini-swirls
within the eye, which is characteristic of
powerful tropical systems.  

Some of you might be thinking, "What do I care? I'm not going to Japan."

Well, yes, but you want to be sympathetic to the people having to deal with such a terrible storm.

If you insist on looking for a way Vongfong might affect you, here it is: Sometimes, when a huge typhoon heads north, past Japan, it rejiggers the jet stream and makes it plunge southward into the central or eastern United States.

That causes a cold snap in the eastern half of the U.S.

That's not guaranteed, of course, since the typhoon/cold wave connection doesn't always work. Still, some long range models indicate a spell of chilly weather in New England, at least around the Oct 17-21 or so.

We'll see what happens.

Cool Images: New England's Fall Colors And Morning Fog From Space

The landscape in this visual satellite photo has turned
orange in southern Quebec and northern New
England. That's fall foliage.  

Two weather satellite images from the University of Wisconsin, Madison Space, Science and Engineering Center pretty much sum up fall in New England just awesomely.

The first fascinating satellite photo in this post is a visible image taken amid the clear skies Saturday.

With no clouds to get in the way, you can see the rust colored hue of the landscape in southern Quebec, New York's Adirondacks, and the northern parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

That orange-ish hue is the autumn foliage, approaching peak in this region. More to the south, you can see things are still mostly green in southern New England.  

Morning fog is seen in the Connecticut River
valley, and in the valleys of central and eastern Vermont.  

The second satellite photo was taken this morning.

You can see river valley fog snaking up through the valleys, especially along the length of the Connecticut River, and in the Winooski and White River valleys of central and eastern Vermont.

Pretty cool vantage points of our beautiful autumn weekend.

Weather Images: Fires, Storms And An Autumn-Like Satellite Photo

The Northwestern United States is still burning, as is western Canada.

There's big storms and flash flooding around Texas, and that cool air is hanging on, for now in the Midwest.

Which leads us to today's random images. (Click on each one to get a bigger, better view)

The first shows a apocalyptic scene in British Columbia in a view of a forest fire in that neck of the woods. Forecasts call for more hot, dry weather, in British Columbia, so no relief seems to be on the way.

A little rain might come down more to the north, so that might help. Meanwhile, the city of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories is choked in smoke, and there have been evacuations in British Columbia.

Elsewhere in Canada, storms are a problem. The second image, from @PrairieChasers on Twitter, shows a supercell storm in Alberta yesterday.

Today, supercells, severe weather and tornadoes are forecast in southeastern Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, the American Midwest has been engulfed in cool, autumnal weather this week. This satellite photo shows how the warm July sun stirs up lots of little cumulus clouds as the sun warms the land, creates little updrafts, which condense into clouds as the updrafts rise into the cold air.

Near lakes, the sun doesn't warm the water so much, so you can see how clear it is, with no clouds over and near lakes.

It's going to warm up dramatically in the Midwest over the next few days, as summer comes back for a return engagement.

Friday Morning Satellite Yielded Beautiful Fog Image

Yesterday morning, visible satellite photos showed clear skies over the Northeast, with fingers of fog extending up the river valleys.

With the clear skies and the rains that hit in the previous days, the cool air in the valleys, the wet ground and the rivers combined to form the fog.

The satellite image made the Northeast look like a block of exquisite, veined black marble. Beautiful.

And, as is usual in cases like this, the fog burned off and created a picture perfect summer day across basically all of the Northeast.

Fascinating Satellite Loop Of This Week's Big Tornado Outbreak

Here's what this week's two day outbreak of tornadoes looked like from space. It's fascinating and horrifying to watch the big tornadic thunderstorms blossom, eventually die out only to be replaced by more tornadic storms.

The tornadoes killed 35 people from Arkansas to Alabama.

Great Satellite View Of Today's Massive Storm

The huge storm that caused all kinds of issues in the eastern half of the nation, including blizzards,

tornadoes, floods, severe thunderstorms and high winds, looked awesome today in this satellite photo from NOAA:

Click on the image to make it bigger and easier to see the details.

Morning Fog Makes Vermont Satellite Image Look Like Beautiful Black Marble

The photo is this post is a visible satellite shot of Vermont and surrounding states early Monday morning.

The spider web pattern makes the image of Vermont look like beautiful, expensive, black marble.

Those little fingers of whitish clouds against the dark background is the fog that forms so frequently in river valleys on calm mornings this time of year.

The fog is most noticeable in the Winooski River , White River and Passumpsic River valleys. I also like how the fog creeps up the valleys containing the tributaries of these rivers.

I've also noticed the fog pattern has been almost identical each of the past few mornings. And as we know, the fog always burns off by mid morning, and today, like the past few, will be gorgeous.

So, So Easy To Find Today's Cold Front

Talk about easy!

Hmm, now just where is that cold front?
Yep, right there.  

Any bozo could figure out where the cold front was today, the one that promised to bring a crisp fall day to the Northeast on Thursday and frost to some of the colder mountain valleys Thursday night.

The National Weather Service in South Burlington, Vermont released a satellite image of the Northeast, takem this afternoon.

You can click on the image to make it bigger and even more easy to read.

Finding the cold front is no difficult, Where's Waldo task, is it?

Often, in the summer, it's hard to find weak little fronts and disturbances that would influence our weather, unless you know how and where to look.  Since these summer weather features are so hard to discern sometimes, you get an inaccurate forecast every once in awhile.

As we transition to fall, weather systems tend to become more obvious.  And easier to track, too.  As we get more toward winter, the weather systems remain obvious, but grow bigger and more complex. So cold season forecasts aren't always easy, either.

No wonder forecasters pretty much nailed the timing and strength of today's cold front. It was practically shouting out its position.