Storm And Its Aftermath Overperforming In Some Vermont Spots

At 10:30 a.m. Thursday, rain was changing to snow at
my place in St. Albans, Vermont. 

I said yesterday that weather conditions would change rapidly in Vermont and that sure as hell happened.

Around my house in St. Albans was typical. At 10 a.m. Thursday it was raining.

By 11:30 a.m., it was snowing hard, more than two inches of heavy snow was on the ground and motorists could barely make it up the hill on the road in front of my house.

In most of Vermont, the snow tapered off in the afternoon and most areas got about as much snow as forecast - a dusting in southeastern Vermont at most, and one to three inches elsewhere.  Some spots overperformed, though.

A good five inches accumulated at my place in St. Albans, but I'm at a high elevation away from Lake Champlain.

Now we're into the aftermath, with moisture wrapping around the back side of the storm, which is now way northeast of us. As expected, epic lake effect snow bands are crashing off the Great Lakes into western New York.  A few places in the famous Tug Hill Plateau snow belt could get a total of four feet of accumulation off this.

For us here in Vermont, this is an amazingly good set up for a pretty whopping snowfall along the western slopes of the Green Mountains, at least in the central and northern parts of the the state.

An hour later, at 11:30 a.m. it was back to a winter wonderland

If you looked at radar returns Friday morning, you can see a major snowband plowing into an area just south of Watertown, New York and smashing into the Adirondacks, releasing most of its snow.

But the remains of the snow band, combined with that moisture rotating around the back side of the storms, continues that radar-indicated snow into and through northern Vermont.

Especially in the Champlain Valley, very little of that snow is hitting the ground: The Adirondacks are blocking the moisture.  Elsewhere in northern Vermont, snowfall overnight has been light and continues that way this morning.

But I imagine the high elevation slopes of the Green Mountains are kind of getting clobbered. As of 6 a.m., I haven't seen much in the way of updated snow totals, but that will come later.

This state of affairs will continue all day today and well into tonight.   I suspect we'll see some surprisingly deep accumulations on those western slopes, and in favored locations in the Northeast Kingdom by Saurday.  

If you live right in Burlington, or Middlebury, or in the Connecticut River Valley south of St. Johnsbury, you'll wonder what all the fuss is about. There, you'll get, at the very most, two inches of new snow between now and Saturday.   Most likely you'll see an inch, if that.

Head into the mountains, though, and it will be a different story. The National Weather Service in South Burlington is already predicting that between 1 p.m. yesterday and 7 p.m. tonight, four to as much as eight inches of snow will come down in the high elevations north of Route 2, with a little more after that.

Tonight, a boundary - essentially a weak cold front - will sag southward into Vermont. That will, for a time, enhance the snowfall over northern and central Vermont.  Once this boundary passes your location, snowfall will taper off dramatically, even if you start the night getting a ton of snow.

This boundary, once it goes by, will suppress moisture from that Lake Ontario snow band to the south, leaving northern and central Vermont with pretty much just flurries Saturday.

The following is by no means an official forecast, and I readily admit I don't have nearly  the expertise of a full-fledged meteorologist.  But I've seen this movie before, and I would not be surprised to see a foot or more - maybe 18 inches or more - of new snow between last night and Saturday morning in isolated spots on some mountains.

I'll repeat that's not most of us.  Even on most valley floors in northern Vermont away from Lake Champlain, most forecasts think those areas will only see another one to five inches of fluff.

Enjoy the deep powder on some mountains this weekend, because another warming trend is due next week. Hey, we're getting into March, you can't expect winter, even a warm one like this has been, to last forever