Strange, Wild Temperature Gyrations In New England With Today's Storm

The effect of sharp temperature changes today..
This is my yard at 10 a.m., with snow on the ground
and ice on the trees. At this point, freezing rain
had just ended at the temperature was 33 degrees.
Check the photo below to see how it
looked like in my yard just a few hours later

The storm that moved over the Northeast today was wild, as has been the trend of impressive weird storms this winter, but the temperature changes associated with today's weather were the most remarkable at all

For all you non-weather geeks out there, this wasn't your imagination. The temperature changes and who was hot and who was cold simultaneously was really weird.

First you have to consider the change in temperature from the depths of the Arctic cold snap over the weekend and what the temperatures were like today.

Montpelier, Vermont went from a record-tying minus 19 Sunday morning to 46 above this afternoon. That's a 65 degree change in two days!   Burlington, Vermont's change from Sunday morning to this afternoon was even a little bigger, going from 13 below to 55 above, for a total of 68 degrees.

That 13 below Sunday in Burlington was not a record low, but the 55 above today WAS a record high, beating the old record of 49 set in 1954 and 1921.

Today's record high in Burlington was the fourth time so far this month we had a record high in the 50s.  It was also, impressively, the hottest it's been since that epic Christmas Eve heat wave that set Burlington's all time December record high of 68 degrees.

Saranac Lake too the prize for the biggest Sunday to  Tuesday temperature rise, going from 30 below to 49 above, a difference of 79 degrees in two days.

There have been cases where temperatures in Vermont and New England have changed more dramatically, but those cases are rare.

The biggest two day change in temperature I could find in fairly recent memory, at least in Burlington, Vermont came in 1994, when the temperature reached a record low of 29 below on January 27, and then warmed to 47 degrees on January 29, an increase of 76 degrees, which is absolutely incredible.

Another odd aspect of today's weather was the dramatic differences in temperature over short distances.

The same view of my yard at 4 p.m. today. Ice and snow
were largely gone, and the temperature was 50 degrees.  

Very warm air streamed in aloft. In many locations, strong winds mixed the warm air down to the surface of the Earth, so cold, dense air was scoured out.

In deeper valleys, the cold air stayed there, tough, immune to the winds a few thousand feet overhead which would have removed the cold air.

At 1 p.m. today, the temperature at Bennington, Vermont was 55 degrees. Just 46 miles to the northeast as the crow flies in the Connecticut River valley town of Springfield, Vermont, the temperature was just 31 degrees at 1 p.m., a full 24 degrees cooler.

Even more impressive were the 11 a.m. temperatures between Whitefield, New Hampshire and St. Johnsbury, Vermont, only 23 miles apart.

At that time, it was 52 degrees in Whitefield and 31 degrees in St. Johnsbury.

By the way, when the warm air moved in today in any given community, the change was abrupt. Whitefield went from 33 degrees to 50 degrees between 9 and 10 a.m. today.

St. Johnsbury's big change came later. There, it went from 37 degrees at 3 p.m. to 52 degrees at 4 p.m.

The storm responsible for all this moved north through central New York and the Adirondacks. When the storm's cold front went through Saranac Lake late this afternoon, the temperature plunged from 49 to 36 degrees between 4 and 5 p.m.

In New York's St. Lawrence Valley, it never did warm up today, as expected. They were on the cold, western side of the storm.

Heavy snow and a lot of freezing rain caused a lot of problems there. Massena, New York had 6.5 inches of snow followed by a half inch coating of freezing rain, and now it's snowing again there.

I'm sure there was some tree and power line damage in that area.

More to the west, around Rochester, New York and environs, the storm dumped a good foot and a half of snow. This wasn't the fluffy lake effect snow they're used to. This was a dense, fairly heavy and wet snow. I'd hate to be digging out there.

Now that the storm is departing, the extreme temperature gyrations will taper off. But we in the Northeast are in a weather pattern that favors abrupt changes in temperature, and I suspect this regime will last at least into early March.

You can see it in the forecast for the next several days in Burlington, Vermont, high temperatures Wednesday through next Tuesday are forecast as follows: 32, 20, 33, 43, 40, 38 and 27.

I hope you like change, because that's what you're going to get.