Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Storm Pretty Much Done In Northeast Finally

The scene in front of my house in St. Albans, Vermont
this morning with a lilac bush smushed by
dense, heavy snow and plenty of snow to shovel.
I awoke to an additional two inches of snow at my weather hacienda in St. Albans, Vermont this morning, bringing the storm total to nine inches.

Impressive, as I'd only been expecting a couple of inches before the storm.

One last clot of moisture crossed northern Vermont last night, bringing that additional burst of snow. There are many reports of two to five inches of snow last night with that last band.

Unlike Sunday's snow, last night's parting sot from the storm that's heading away from us now was light and fluffy and will be easier to shovel or sweep.

The storm actually caused damage on my property. splitting a large weeping willow tree and causing minor damage to lilac bushes and evergreen shrubs.

Other than snow showers in the mountains today and flurries elsewhere, there won't be much in the way of snow anymore.

Western New York State got clobbered. I found it interesting that the storm system pulled moisture all the way from the tropics near Bermuda up into Quebec, and then turned it southward across the Great Lakes into New York.

Lake effect snows like this usually work by pulling moisture off the relatively warm waters of the lakes and dumping it on land in the form of snow, and that was the case here. But the snow was enhanced even more by that tropical moisture from Bermuda.
This willow tree in my St. Albans, Vermont yard
suffered significant damage in this snowstorm. Note
the large branch that's cracked and now hanging
vertically after nine inches of snow fell.  

This arrangement also pulled lake and other moisture into southwestern New England and the higher elevations near the lower Hudson Valley of New York.  Which meant quite a bit of snow fell there.

Here are some of the totals I came across, based on reports from the Weather Channel and National Weather Service offices in Buffalo and Albany, New York and Burlington, Vermont:

40 inches, Lacona, New York
21.9 inches, Syracuse, New York, which was that city's largest snowstorm on record.
32 inches, Redfield, New York
30 inches, Osceola, New York
20 inches, Peru, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires.
26 inches, Woodford, Vermont, in the southern Green Mountains east of Bennington.

Higher elevation towns in central and northern Vermont, and the northern Adirondacks, picked up close to a foot of snow.

The next couple of weeks look stormy for much of the nation, with several systems expected to cross the middle and eastern parts of the country. Some of these storms could be fairly strong.

A weak system will affect New England Thanksgiving morning with light snow and rain showers. A potentially stronger storm Saturday could dump a fairly heavy amount of snow and/or rain on the region, but that prospect remains very uncertain.

I'll update you on that when we get closer. Several more storms of rain or snow will likely follow that.

If nothing else, at least it's some drought relief, right?

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