Winter Hangs Tough, At Least Until Around March 10

A burst of snow adds another dusting of snow to my St. Albans yard
last week. We're on the cusp of March, but winter weather will
last into the new month.  

Friday is the start of meteorological spring, when weather geeks, climatologists and that sort of crowd say the new season begins.

It's arbitrary. Considering the period March 1 to May 31 as spring is a convenient way to compare and constrast current and past seasons. Since records are kept month to month, it makes sense.

Climatologists be damned, don't count on spring weather arriving this Friday, here or in most places in the nation.

A very large blast of Arctic air will be just beginning to enter the nation via the northwestern Great Plains on Friday. This great gush of frigid air will engulf most of the nation east of the Rockies, except maybe Florida.

Granted, this Arctic outbreak will be far from the Worst Ever. It will be the kind of cold wave that often occurs in early March. There might be some daily record low temperatures broken in the northern Plains and perhaps a few other places, but it's not coming close to be historic.

Here in Vermont, the Arctic air won't have arrived yet by Friday, so the optimists among us might feel a subtle taste of spring as temperatures rise into the seasonable upper 20s and low 30s. That won't last.

Before we get to Friday we've got enough winter weather to get through. A small storm is scooting by to our south, and it's about to snow in much of Vermont. You'll notice as of mid-morning today that the overcast is lowering and thickening.

It'll start this afternoon. By tomorrow new snow accumulation in Vermont will be modest: It looks like it will be a dusting to an inch north of Route 2; about 1 to 3 inches between Route 2 and Route 4, and three to five inches south of Route 4.

January-like cold will hang on into Thursday. It'll be in the single numbers above or below zero tonight and tomorrow night, and in the upper teens and low 20s Thursday.

Things get murky with the forecast going into the weekend. Storminess seems likely, but how it will shake it out is not easy to tease out. There seems like there will be some snow, possibly mixed with a little rain Saturday afternoon and night. It's too soon to talk accumulation.

There's even more question marks come later Sunday and Monday. There's some indications there could be a pretty good snowstorm, but the forecast models are all over the place with this. Some say a lot of snow, some say a little, some say nothing.

So, here in Vermont, right now the best I can do is say between Sunday and Monday we'll get between a trace and two feet of snow. That's worthless, right?

That Arctic air that I talked about will flood into Vermont Sunday or Monday and stay around for a good part of next week. The cold won't be as intense as it will be in the northern Plains. The sun angle is higher now than it was in December and January, so the air will modify under that sun on its trip to the Northeast.

Still, it will be colder than normal by both March and January standards.

There are preliminary signs that things might move toward spring in much of the nation around March 10 or so. The flow of Arctic air look like it wants to get largely cut off after that date. There's no guarantees on this, and it's hard to tell how warm it will get. It is reason for hope, though.

Meteorological spring or not, milder weather is inevitable as we move through March, so the chances of welcome thaws are going to increase, whether or not the weather pattern cooperates or not.

Signs point to continued storminess well into March, so things could be a pretty wild wide through much of the month.