More Storminess In Vermont; It's Summer

A chaotic looking evening sky over Colchester, Vermont on
Saturday as thunderstorms blossomed in the region. 

Many of us in Vermont were treated once again Saturday to some fun, stormy skies, thunder and lightning.

There were reports of some damage as a few of the storms became severe. Interestingly at my place in St. Albans, Vermont, I was under a severe thunderstorm warning for the third time in a week, which is impressive. The storms around here, including those last evening, did not turn out to be damaging at all.

Still, strong thunderstorm winds knocked down trees Saturday in a variety of places around the region, including several spots in the Northeast Kingdom around Bradford and Orange and in Waterbury, where a number of trees blew over.

An initial round of severe storms hit southern New England the mid-Atlantic states Saturday afternoon, but missed Vermont.  Several places down there had high winds and hail up to the size of golf balls, so we should be glad we avoided that.

That strong upper level low in Quebec we've been talking about was slowly sinking southward Saturday evening. Even though there's not a major storm at the Earth's surface. this upper level pool of cold air is dynamic and creating plenty of instability.

Warm, humid weather usually feeds thunderstorms, but it wasn't super warm or super humid last evening. But the energy of this cool pool from Quebec was able to make lots of thunderstorms blossom Saturday evening. Some of them were strong to severe. But even if not, they were widespread.

And pretty, as you can see by the photos in this post.

Orange post-sunset light pokes through dark storm clouds
Saturday evening in St. Albans, Vermont.

You wouldn't expect anything in the way of thunderstorms today, again, at least on paper. It's overcast and cool this morning. Nothing that would inspire thunderstorms. A dull rain, maybe, but nothing dramatic.

But like I said, this upper level storm is pretty feisty and will be able to kick off at least some thunderstorms. I think very few, if any will make it to severe levels.

Maybe in southern New England, there will probably be a few storms with damaging winds and large hail, mostly because it's a little warmer and a little sunnier there to add energy.

Even so, in the rest of Vermont, there will be frequent showers around. Many of us will hear thunder and see lightning today. A few thunderstorms will be able to generate gusty winds. Again nothing destructive, but the strongest storms could produce gusts as high as 30 to 35 mph.

There is even a good chance some of us will get hail. Nothing big, just pea sized. It's so cold aloft that  if you get to just 8,500 feet in elevation, it'll get below freezing. Since there's not much space between subfreezing air and down where we are, there's little time or any hail stones that do form to melt. So some will make it down here.

Despite relatively dry-ish air over us, some of the showers and storms today could produce locally heavy downpours. The heaviest rains if they get going won't last long, so there's no real threat of flooding.

A band of heavy showers, with a few lightning strikes was over the Montreal area and heading south toward the Vermont border as of 8:45 a.m. this Sunday morning. Another zone of pretty good showers was over New York and appeared to be heading toward the southern half of Vermont.

The Quebec band of showers and thunderstorms appeared to be strengthening somewhat or at least holding its own as it moves south this morning, so these forecasts of potentially gusty and hail-ish storms seems pretty realistic.

This cold upper level low will get out of our hair quickly and it will be back go summer warmth by tomorrow.

As the week goes on, it'll keep getting warmer and especially more humid, so by the second half of the week, we'll be back to having chances of mostly afternoon and evening thunderstorms.

Here's a brief video I took of a stormy sunset and lightning strike as seen from St. Albans Saturday evening (Click on the square like thingy on the bottom right of the video to make it bigger and easier to see: