Snow Favors Southern New England For A Change

Schematic of coastal storm forecast near coastal New
England Monday. Its exact track will determine how
much snow we get in Vermont. 

Well, here's a switch.

All winter, the snows have been coming down like crazy in northern New England, especially in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, northern and parts of central New Hampshire, and big time in northern Maine, where they've had a record snowy winter up in Caribou.

So far this winter, Caribou has had 147 inches of snow, and as of yesterday, there was 43 inches on the ground.

Southern New England, by contrast, spent the winter in a snow drought.

Now, as winter nears its end, it seems that southern New England is getting the snow, and northern reaches are mostly missing out. In our region, southern Vermont looks like it might get some fairly decent new snows in the coming days, while northern reaches are more iffy.

The storm that ended early yesterday morning left behind a dusting in northern Vermont but a few inches in the south. This morning, a weak system is flinging some snow flakes down on places like Connecticut, but nothing here in Vermont.

The next system is scheduled to come through Saturday night. Here in Vermont a weak northern piece of this little storm looks like it could give us a dusting, maybe an inch of snow. A stronger, but still not terribly impressive little coastal storm has the potential to deposit three to six inches of snow in southeastern New England. 

If that hits Boston as expected, that would probably be their largest snowstorm of the season. But yeah, yawn.

Then we get to the bigger storm that we've been talking about for Sunday night and Monday. There's still a bunch of questions as to how much snow will fall and where. But early indications are still pointing toward more snow to the south than the north.

The American computer model is furthest south and east with the storm, taking it pretty far off the coast of New England. That would dump a pretty good snowfall on southern and central New England, but it would be mostly a whiff for the North Country.

Other models, including the European, bring the storm closer. That would mean mixed precipitation in far southern New England, and good snowstorm for central New England, including southern Vermont. Up north, there would probably be just light stuff.

At this point, the European model looks more likely, at least to me and a lot of forecasters who are better at this than I am. Still, there's no guarantees, and this forecast will surely change as we draw closer to the event.

After that, we get a week of midwinter cold. If you like January, you'll like next week. During next week, we'll revert back to more snow north than south, but even the north won't get much at all. Some weak little fronts embedded in the cold northwest wind flow will occasionally deposit a little snow in northern areas next week, especially in the mountains. But each puff of snow will probably leave a dusting to an inch of new snow, so it's nothing special.

Burlington, Vermont has the potential to join a relatively rare winter club.  By my count, there has only been 11 winters in Burlington since the late 1880s with at least 100 inches of snow for the season. (Interestingly, five of them have been since 1993.)

So far this season, Burlington has had 87.2 inches of snow, definitely above average. That means we only need 12.8 inches of snow to make make the winter of 2018-19 join the 100 inch club. No guarantees but we can easily get that much snow between now and May.