Winter About To Hit With A Vengeance

It looks like it's going to be one of those years when winter hits early, fast and hard.

Will the drive to Grandmother's
house the day before Thanksgiving
look like this? Maybe.  

It's cold out this Saturday morning in Vermont, and kind of gloomy, and there is a snow flurry or two around.

But you haven't seen ANYTHING yet.

A big, bad cold front straight from the Arctic is going to come through this afternoon. Get ready for some snow showers, and maybe some snow squalls, that, for the first time this season in many areas, will turn the roads into those proverbial winter skating rinks.

The winds will howl and the temperatures will plunge tonight well into the teens as wind chills fall to near zero.

Sunday, by any measure, will be a horrible, nasty day. Even by January standards, it will be bitterly cold out there. Temperatures won't get out of the teens, wind gusts to 40 mph will keep wind chills below zero, and that bit of snow we get later today will blow around some.

Just ugly.

The winter weather is going to stick around through next week, so if you didn't get your fall yard chores done yet,  it might not happen.

You've probably heard about a possible nor'easter Tuesday night and Wednesday. That's possible, actually. There is a big storm spreading wind, snow, ice, and other havoc from California through Texas and on into the southeastern United States.

That storm will turn into a nor'easter, but the question is, how far off the coast will it venture? If it swings pretty far to the east, as some computer models suggest, we up here in Vermont will get little if any snow.

If it hugs the coast, as other computer models are saying (including the usually reliable European model) then we here in Vermont get a big dump of snow on Wednesday.

So right now, my prediction is we'll get zero to 18 inches of snow on Wednesday. Forecasts in the next couple of days will refine the expected amount of snow we'll get.

Whatever happens, it will stay wintry cold through Black Friday

In any event, I hope you have your snow tires on, your warm boots and winter parkas ready. You're so going to need them.