Will The Snow This Week Finally Be The End Of It?

For the fifth consecutive morning, the daffodils attempting to grow in
my St. Albans, Vermont gardens are shivering in the snow. 

For the fifth consecutive day, frozen precipitation is falling outside my window this morning in St. Albans, Vermont.

And it's going to snow tomorrow. And Friday. Make it stop!

It probably will.

I'm not going to promise anything, but there's a decent chance that the snow that falls in Vermont through the rest of the week will be the last of it for the season.  At least in the lower elevations.

I'm pretty sure it will snow in the mountains in May. It almost always does.

Once we get into late April, it should be hard to get snow in the valleys. Certainly not impossible, but definitely more difficult. Normal daytime temperatures are approaching 60 degrees by the last week of the month, and normal lows are above freezing.

Signs are getting stronger that the weather pattern is changing, and next week should be warmer, which would pre-empt any snow. I'm guessing that by the time we get any new cool spell sometimes in May, that cool weather would still be too mild to support snow.

Again, that's not a promise. It can certainly snow in Vermont's valleys in May. Sometimes quite heavily.

The worst example of a May snowstorm, according to David Ludlum's trusty "Vermont Weather Book." was on May 15, 1834, when the storm total came in at three feet deep in the hills above Newbury. It snowed at a rate of one inch every 10 minutes, which is an incredible rate for a mid-winter storm, never mind May. In that snowstorm low elevation Randolph and Rutland got a foot.

In more modern times, we've gotten May snowstorms. In May, 1966, it snowed for three days in a row up in Newport. Burlington got 3.5 inches of snow on May 9. 1966.  That was the latest in the season Burlington has ever gotten so much snow.

For the record, the average date of the last one inch snowfall in Burlington during the spring is April 5. That 1966 storm is the record for the latest one inch.

The average date for the last snow flurry in Burlington, just a trace of snow, is April 15, so we're already passed that, too. Though I think Burlington will get at least a trace of snow Thursday and/or Friday.

The latest trace of snow on record in Burlington came on May 31, 1945. So yeah, it can happen.

But just for laughs and giggles, let's just hope that this week's snow is the last of it for the season. A man can dream, can't he?