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| Quite a winter wonderland in my St. Albans, Vermont yard this morning despite the fact it is March 24 - technically spring |
We're not entirely done with the snow this weekend yet, believe it or not. No, there's no new big snowstorm coming, at least in the immediate future. But a strong cold front coming through tonight will drop at least a little more snow.
MORE SNOWFALL TONIGHT EXPLAINED
Though the cold front is strong, the good news is it's starved for moisture. So nobody is going to get another foot or two of snow. The National Weather Service office in South Burlington is saying most places in northern Vermont will get an inch or snow or less out of this cold front. Some mountainous areas could pick up a couple inches.
That forecast looks like it will be accurate. However:
Much like this big snowstorm we had Friday turned out to be a big overachiever, there is some evidence this evening's cold front could also give some of us a snowy surprise or two.
As I said, the cold front is pretty strong. It will be moving into some pretty unstable air. This combination could really kick off some heavy snow showers or even squalls, despite the relative lack of moisture in the air.
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| Jackson the Weather Dog appears to be trying to measure the water equivalent of the wet snow in his St. Albans, Vermont driveway this morning. |
Some of us, especially in the northern half of the state, could get some bursts of heavy snow. That would quickly mess up the roads with ice and poor visibility.
It could also lead to some surprising accumulations. I'm quite sure the NWS meteorologists who are way, way more skilled than me, are right that most of us will only get an inch or two of snow, or even less.
But there is the potential that a few places in the North could pick up several inches of snow if any of the squalls end up moving sluggishly.
This kind of thing happened on the night of March 16 when a few places in the northern mountains and the Northeast Kingdom picked up a half foot or more of snow. I'm not saying that will exactly happen again, but, again, some people might have some surprise shoveling to do again.
The snow will tend to diminish in intensity as it heads south over Vermont overnight, so southern areas will get little or no snow.
A MELTDOWN COMING?
If you're sick of snow, and my raising the possibility of more snow tonight has depressed you, now I have something a bit uplifting.
After tonight, it looks like there will be no precipitation through at least Friday. Starting Monday, each day at least through Thursday will be sunny to, at worst, partly sunny. It will start off cold Monday and Tuesday, with high temperatures staying in mid and upper 20s in cold northern areas, to low to mid 30s for most of us, to upper 30s in the warmer valleys, especially south.
That will allow winter sports enthusiasts to continue enjoying all this snow. Plus the strong late March sunshine will erode the snow in sunny corners on both those days. That will give us hope.
Then it will start to warm up. Quite a few 40s will pop up Wednesday with a good shot of 50s by the end of the week. So places with little snow on the ground will have bare ground again by the end of the week. And in snowy low and mid Vermont elevations, the snow cover will take a hit.
No rain is in the forecast through Friday night at the earliest, so in the short term, the meltdown won't cause any real flooding problems. Even as temperatures are expected to stay near or above freezing, even at night Thursday and Friday nights.
No promises on flood threats after that. It all depends on rain and melt patterns and paces.
IMPRESSIVE SNOW STATS
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| Hmmm. No signs of daffodils in front of my St. Albans, Vermont house this morning, despite the fact that is is technically spring. |
Averill, Vermont, way up there in the Northeast Kingdom, had a four feet of snow on the ground as of Saturday morning.
Some other towns in the Northeast Kingdom had at least three feet of snow on the ground. The snow depth atop Mount Mansfield had exceeded 10 feet by the time the snow stop flying Saturday.
Seasonal snowfall for the winter of 2018-19 is now up to 101.8 inches in Burlington, which is the 12th snowiest on records dating back to the 1880s. We could move up in those rankings, because it usually snows at least a little in April. Just sayin.
At least I'm pretty sure Burlington won't have the snowiest winter on record. That was 145.4 inches in 1970-71. At least I HOPE we don't get another nearly four feet of snow before the season finally wraps up.
Depending on where you are in Vermont, it looks like different seasons. The National Weather Service office in South Burlington received 6.7 inches of snow out of the storm. But along the Lake Champlain shoreline in Burlington, accumulations were closer to three inches.
By the end of the day Saturday, the March sun had melted some of that snow. There were big bare patches already, and it really did look like March.
Meanwhile, in harder hit places, like my place in St. Albans well east of Lake Champlain, that foot of snow we received still had me in a deep winter wonderland by the end of the day Saturday.
I whined about the snow, but it could be worse.
I talked via phone with a customer at work yesterday in South Lake Tahoe who reported there was still nearly six feet of snow on the ground outside her home.
The Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in California has had 648 inches of snow so far this winter. That's 54 FEET of snow.
The deep Sierra snow is good news for Californians who want a water supply for the rest of the year. The snowmelt will feed reservoirs during much of 2019.
During the height of the California drought, water managers saw unprecedented bare ground this time of year at a high Sierra measuring site. This year, on about the same date as the 2015 measurement, they found 113 inches of snow on the ground, or about nine and a half feet of snow. That snow had the equivalent o 43.5 inches of rain in it, so there will be plenty of water coming from the Sierra this spring and summer.
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