If You Think This Is Bad, Wait Until Next Friday's Arctic Blast

Blue nation: This morning's National Weather Service
home page map was a study in blue, filled with
vast areas of wind chill and freeze alerts.

I usually don't like to talk much about forecasts more than five days down the road, but this time I do want to put out an alert that the frigid Arctic cold wave we're having looks like it will reach its crescendo next Friday and Saturday in New England.

It looks very grim. Could be one of the most brutally cold days in my lifetime. Considering I'm 55, that's saying something.

Oh, I know, it might not be as bad as current predictionss are indicating now.  Forecasts change. But some indications for next Friday are shivering my timbers, let me tell ya.

First let's get through the latest Arctic blast, which came in last night. It seemed "warm" in Burlington, Vermont for awhile Saturday afternoon.  The temperature peaked at a lovely, balmy 11 degrees above zero in the afternoon, the hottest it's been since Tuesday evening.

That, of course, didn't last long. It was back to the deep freeze last night, and that will continue through New Year's Eve. Looking at the national weather map, the United States is now Blue Nation, and I'm not talking about politics.

At least half of the U.S. is colored in hues of blue on the National Weather Service home page - filed with wind chill warnings and advisories, and in the south, hard freeze warnings.

I haven't seen such a vast cold wave in the United States in quite a few years.

Can I stop right here and indulge in another rant about people on the roads? During this cold snap, we here in Vermont and a lot of other places in the vast cold zone have been getting little bouts of light snow. It's too cold for salt to work.  The snow and ice stays on the highways. The wind does appears to blow some of the snow off the roads, so they're perfect, right?

Um, no. Car tires have been compacting some of this light snow into black ice. The roads don't look too bad, but they're icy. I saw a lot of cars off Interstate 89 Friday evening and a few more Saturday. Motorists are going 75 mph. They don't get it that there's black ice, which is hard to see. Slow down, morons!!    

This cartoon by George Danby in the Bangor (Maine)
Daily News this week pretty much sums things up. 

At the bottom of this post, you'll see some videos from Michigan of people going too fast on the highways during lake effect snow squalls. People gotta learn to slow down. More people are going to be killed because people are too stupid to slow down on ice and low visibility.

Rant over. Moving on. As expected, it's damn cold today, and will be tonight for New Year's Eve festivities. We're still looking at wind chills in the teens and 20s below zero come midnight in Vermont, so 2018 is starting out by giving us the cold shoulder, to put it gently.

It'll stay cold New Year's Day, then we get into a "mild" spell Tuesday and Wednesday, when high temperatures will rise all the way up into the teens to around 20. Break out those swimsuits, baby!

Then we get into the trouble I talked about at the start of this blog post. An ocean storm will get going in the Bahamas and track northward, well off the East Coast. It will intensify rapidly, and become a vast, intense super strong wind machine.

It's still hard to say how far off the coast this monster will track. At this point it looks far enough away to spare the eastern United States from a lot of snow but it still bears watching.

Once this huge storm approaches the waters off New England, it will tend to curl a little bit toward the northwest, while still strengthening. That could cause a blizzard in eastern Maine if it comes close enough, and a little snow in Vermont. And it will probably cause an epic, dangerous storm in the Canadian Maritimes.

But that's not worries me so much about this storm. All of the Northeast, certainly including Vermont, will be in this huge storm's huge wind field. That means by Friday, I expect that north winds could be gusting in the 30 to 40 mph range, maybe more than that in the higher elevations.

Worse, this storm is going to grab a chunk of Arctic air from Canada and bring it down on us. Friday's chunk of Artic air looks like it might be even colder than the icebox we've got over us today .

The combination of wind and extreme cold looks awful. If this comes to fruition, I expect lots of burst and frozen water pipes as the cold winds push the Arctic air through every nook and cranny of our houses and buildings.

Low temperatures Friday and possibly Saturday night across Vermont and surrounding areas look like they could be in the 20 to 35 below range, and that's not including the wind chill.

Having lived in Vermont all my life so far, I think I've only experienced such conditions two or three times before

Of course, I'm still hoping current computer forecasting models are blowing this all out of proportion and it won't be so bad. That's still certainly a possibility. Maybe by Thursday I'll be doing my best Emily Litella impression: ("Never mind!") But it's still something to watch.

If you're looking for good news, it looks like by next Sunday, the deep chill will start to moderate. There will be more Arctic fronts after next Sunday, it looks like, but those outbreaks of cold air don't look anything nearly as bad as what we're experiencing today, and what we're likely to experience next Friday.

Here's those road crash videos. The first is the most dramatic. The couple in the car, which slid off a Michigan highway, narrate as cars and trucks keep smashing into one another. At least three plow into the couple's car. I'm amazed by how calm the two remain. The second video shows more of the same type of thing.

Let's be careful out there!



And here's  tow truck driver's overview of the scene in Michigan:

California Wildfires, Unbelievably For December, Still Raging. Baked Alaska, Too

A home burns in northern San Diego County, California
earlier this week as flames continue to spread through
the region. In December! 

The wildfires this month in California aren't at the top of the headlines as much anymore, but they are still raging, which is incredible for December, which is supposed to be well within the state's rainy season.

Judging from the southern California weather forecasts for the next few days, the fires might leap back into homes, and the front pages of newspapers and home pages of news web sites.

It remains bone dry in Southern California. No rain is in sight, at least until after Christmas. Offshore winds blowing in from the east are keeping the relative humidity extremely low. And the Santa Ana winds are resurgent, blowing strong again today. They'll continue to gust off and on through Saturday, and could pick up to become very, very dangerous again on Sunday.

The Thomas Fire, the one that burned hundreds of homes in and around Ventura, California once it started on December 4 continues to burn with no end in sight.  It is 30 percent contained, but who knows if it will break fire lines in this weather? Plus, there's a high risk that new fires could break out, even if a fire in northern San Diego County that destroyed 157 homes is largely contained. So is the one in BelAir.

As Reuters reports, the Thomas Fire is California's fifth largest wildfire on record. It has destroyed more than 700 homes, traveled 27 miles and charred 371 square miles, an area larger than New York City. The fire continues to spread, and belch choking smoke through the region. That continues to raise health concerns.

That we are still talking about dangerous wildfire conditions across southern California heading into Christmas is just incredible. Santa Ana winds do still blow fairly frequently in this region in December and even January, but by now, it has normally rained so much that the winds don't spark any major fires. At this time of year, southern Californians should be worried about heavy rains and mudslides, not wildfires.

Not this time.

This wildfire bizarro world in California is not entirely caused by climate change, but climate change has its fingerprints all over the situation. We're in a La Nina weather pattern, which does favor dryness in the Southwest. La Ninas come and go with or without climate change, so there's that.

People also keep building more and more houses in areas that are fire prone, so as long as that trend continues, wildfires will get more and more destructive, with or without climate change.

But the persistence of the dryness and accompanying intense warmth for this time of year is a hallmark of climate change. As the Los Angeles Times reports, California Governor Jerry Brown said climate change has brought his state into a new normal, one in which out of season wildfires like the current ones are becoming more common. He says the situation will worsen, saying that climate change has us "on the road to hell."

Southern California isn't the only place that has gotten weird, unprecedented December wildfires. A wildfire earlier this week in and near Custer State Park, not far from Rapid City, South Dakota, forced evacuations.

A bit odd for a northern state like South Dakota in December, don't you think?

Then let's look at Alaska recently. Nope, no wildfires going on there at the moment. But Anchorage earlier this week had four consecutive days with highs of 45 degrees or more, the first time that's happened in December. In the southeastern Alaska town of Sitka, the overnight low temperture was 53 degrees on December 7. That was one degree warmer than the record high temperature for the date.

Each day since December 3 in normally ultra frigid Fairbanks, Alaska has been at least 18 degrees above normal. November in Barrow, on the northern tip of Alaska, was a whopping 16.4 degrees warmer than normal, by far a record. There's still open water on the northwest coast of Alaska. It should have been locked in frozen well before now.

A weather pattern that makes winter weather unusually warm in Alaska usually means frigid weather in the eastern United States, including here in Vermont. Yes, it's been cold the past couple of days, with temperatures around zero this morning.

However, zero degrees in a Vermont December is nothing unusual. And overall temperatures so far this December are so far running near normal. The weather pattern since the beginning of the month should have kept us well below normal.

This blog post turned into a climate change rant, I get it. But I think it's something we all must get off our chests now and then. It's that important.

Skating Through The South And Blasting Through Winter

Ice storm damage in Helena, Arkansas. By
Stephanie Arnold via KATV.  

Another big winter storm is ending for most of the places it blasted yesterday, and the eastern part of the nation is settling in for more Arctic air.

This is one of those winter that, in general, wasn't so bad at the beginning but really built up to a big crescendo toward the end.

The big problem with yesterday's winter storm was the freezing rain and ice accumulations stretching from Arkansas to North Carolina.

Widespread power failures are still going in Arkansas, Tennessee, northeastern parts of Georgia and sections of North Carolina. (Plus there's probably a few nearby areas I skipped.)

NBC is reporting this morning at least 330,000 homes and businesses across the South have no power because heavy ice accumulations brought down trees, branches and power lines.

It's cold where there's no power, too. Arctic air punched back into the region behind the storm. For instance, it was 14 degrees this morning in Nashville, where about a half inch of ice paralyzed the region.

You start to get power failures during freezing rain if the ice accumulates to about a quarter inch thick. In Tennessee, ice was as much as three quarters of an inch thick, reports the Weather Channel. Many areas reported at least a half inch of ice.

Car crashes, were of course common. Some of them were because people were driving too fast for the conditions.  The city of Memphis, Tennessee reported at least 73 car crashes in about 16 hours, the Commercial Appeal newspaper said. 

WAVY-TV in Virginia had a camera set up on the side of the road in Hampton, Virginia, when this happened:



Notice the SUV stopped just inches from the camera (and the guy standing by filming.)

No serious injuries were reported in this crash.

North of the ice zone, it was heavy snow. Coleman, Kentucky picked up 18 inches of snow, and widespread totals of six to twelve inches were reported from Missouri to Virginia.

As expected, the outer edges of the storm were clipping southeastern New England as of Tuesday morning.

Luckily, after six feet of snow in the past month, this won't amount to much, but it won't help. An inch or two could fall in the Boston area today, and Cape Cod and the Islands expect two to four inches.

Ice storm damage in Memphis, Tennessee.
Photo by Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal

Although it will remain very cold in New England for at least the next week, it might not snow all that much more in the next few days. There will be nuisance snows on several days through the weekend, though.

However, with (cross your fingers!) no HUGE dumps of snow into Saturday, municipalities in New England, with help from outside agencies like the Vermont National Guard, can do some power snow clearing.

You know, get tons of bucket loaders out there to dig the snow out of the streets and store it
in "snow dumps" fields.. or even disposing of it in the ocean, a move that is only legal in extreme cases, due to the pollution contained in the snow from the streets. I think this does qualify as an extreme case.

Speaking of extremes, the cold is locked in through much of the week. The National Weather Service in Indianapolis said the town of Seymour, Indiana got down to 13 below this morning. So did Burlington, Vermont. Of course 13 below in Vermont is not as rare as it is in Indiana but it's still damn cold.

Plus, the overnight low got down to minus 30 in Saranac Lake, New York, minus 26 in Whitefield, New Hampshire and 24 below in Morrisville, Vermont and Sherbrooke, Quebec.

This comes after dozens of cities and towns reported record lows. Erie, Pennsylvania reached 12 below, its all time record low for any date. Watertown, New York reached 34 below on Monday.

Another surge of Arctic air will blast into the Midwest and East Wednesday and Thursday. There's a chance Nashville could get below zero. If that happens, it would be the latest in the winter that has happened on record.

I'm watching another possible snowstorm in the Northeast on Sunday or Monday, but I have no details. Forecasting computer models are all over the place with this, so there's nothing I can hang my hat on yet. We'll see.

The weather pattern is stuck pretty much for the rest of the month. There are still some very uncertain signs the weather pattern could change in early March, but I'm not 100 percent sure it will yet, and it could always change into a pattern that brings more snow and cold to places that don't need it.

Stay tuned.