Spring Sunshine Really Nails Vermont Snow Cover

7:47 a.m. Tuesday: A winter wonderland in St. Albans, Vermont

In scenes surely being replayed through Vermont over the past couple of days, the snow from Monday night's storm is disappearing super quickly in the face of the strong spring sun. .

There's still snow on the ground in places where the storm was bigger. Places that had 10, 11 inches of snow will go at least a couple more days before the white ground turns brown again.

Here in St. Albans, we only got 3.5 inches of snow Monday night, so the process of melting went faster, as you can see by the series of photos in this post.

4:53 p.m. Tuesday: The melt is definitly underway. 

Tellingly, there is still an inch of snow on the ground in protected areas that got zero sunshine.  The rest is gone.

Temperatures since the storm have been mild, but not wildly warm. High temperatures Tuesday were only within a couple degrees of 40, and Wednesday got into the mid-40s after an overnight freeze.

Had this storm hit in December with its low sun angle, we'd still probably have most of the snow cover left.

But the sun is high now, so those who were disheartened by the snow get a break.  It melted. Relatively unfrozen ground also helped with this melt.

3:42 p.m. Wednesday. Almost gone! 

Of course, there's a declining but still real risk of big snowstorms right through mid-April at least, though there are none currently in the forecast.

The next real storm, expected Sunday, is likely to be mostly rain, with perhaps a little snow in the mountains and Northeast.

If we do end up getting a new snowstorm in the coming few weeks, take heart. It will melt very quickly.

The landscape emerging from the snow is pretty brown, as you'd expect during mud season in March.

6:36 p.m. Wednesday. The snow is gone! 

However, it's been a relatively warm month. I've got daffodil shoots coming up everywhere on my property. Other plants are showing signs of life, too.

The initial, tentative green shoots are about as far along as they were around April 10 last year, so we're doing pretty well.

I could hear all the spring birds chirping happily outside as I write this morning.

Given the awfulness of what's going on out in the world right now, we all need this springtime hope.

In this time of anxiety and fear, it's great to latch onto something that gives us peace and something to look forward to.

Spring weather in Vermont is imperfect and sometimes frustrating. But the greening up will come. If you can and are able to maintain your social distancing, go out and enjoy the season.  Trust me. It will help.

Dramatic Greenland Ice Sheet Melt This Week Actually Raises Sea Level

Via Rolling Stone/Getty Images: Melting ice this week in Greenland.

As expected, that heat wave in Europe last week moved into Greenland over the past couple of days, which is definitely not a good thing.

Temperatures there are 25 to 30 degrees above normal, with some low elevation places up there in Greenland reaching the 70s. In the middle and peak of the Greenland ice sheet, at an elevation of 10,551 feet,  it managed to get above freezing for 11 hours on Tuesday, which is extremely rare, the Washington Post reports. (In the height of summer, Summit, Greenland's normal high temperatures are just in the low teens, believe it or not.) 

The Greenland melt down this week could well be the worst in recorded history, probably besting the benchmark great melt of 2012. Rolling Stone reported that some melting occured on 87 percent of the Greenland ice sheet on Tuesday, before the peak of the heat wave.  By the way, I know Rolling Stone is primarily a music magazine, but they've gotten into some very good political and climate change reporting in recent years.

Before, say, the 1980s, it was very rare for most of the ice sheet to be melting simultaneously, though of course parts of it would experience some melting on the warmer days of summer. Still, the amount of ice lost on Greenland in the summer was always balanced by accumulations of new snow and ice during the winter.

Not any longer. Unlike ice in the Arctic ocean, which melts like ice cubes in a glass and doesn't affect sea levels, Greenlands meltwater runs off and contributes to global sea level rises.

Says Rolling Stone:  "This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1 mm"

Yes, that's only 0.004 of an inch, so that alone you won't notice. But as glaciers worldwide melt and Greenland continues to shed ice, and Antarctica begins to thaw, too, you can see how 0.0004 of an inch in a week can add up to a lot of sea level rise over the course of several decades.

There's more meltwater coming off of Greenland. The Washington Post said 197 billion tons of ice melted from Greenland and flowed into the ocean during the month of July.  

Of course in Greenland, like everywhere else, the warming won't be consistently this bad, and not every year will have such great melt downs. They're just becoming more frequent. In some years, like 2017 and 2018, Greenland experiences chilly summers, so on those occasions, there is very little net ice loss from the ice sheet, as the Category 6 blog notes.

But studies show that Greenland melts like the one in 2012 happen on average only once in 250 years, the Washington Post says. That another one is occuring now, just seven years later, is worrisome.

This much melt exposes older snow and ice to the sun. The older ice has bits of soot and dirt and such in it, so it's darker. That will draw in more of the sun's heat, and contribute to even more melting. That would happen before the melting season shuts down in the early autumn, or would happen again if this winter's new snow melts and exposes the old ice again.

Big Melt This Week In Greenland Is Bad, But Not (Yet) The End Of The World

Orange areas are spots in Greenland that
experienced melting on Thursday. That's
a very unsually large area for this
early in the season.

This sounds dire: Just on Wednesday, two billion tons of ice melted off of Greenland.

To put it in perspective, though, the two billion tons of ice that melted off of Greenland in one day is certainly very bad news, but it doesn't mean the whole ice sheet will go away in a flash. The vast, vast majority of the ice is still obviously very much there in Greenland.

But still. Forty-five percent of the Greenland ice sheet surface was melting Wednesday, which is pretty much the most anybody has seen this early in the season.  Temperatures were as much as 40 degrees above normal in Greenland, notes the Washington Post.

A very high elevation weather station in Greenland, aptly named Summit, briefly went above freezing this week. Thaws are rare at Summit. The last time it happened was in July, 2012, the Washington Post notes.

Much of the thawed ice that didn't manage to flow into the oceans will refreeze in cooler days ahead, but the initial thawing has weakened some of the ice, making it more prone to melting if it gets warm again later this summer.

Climatologists always worry about Greenland's ice sheet. As it melts off, it flows into the ocean and raises global sea levels. This year, the melt season in Greenland is definitely off to a bad start. It could rival the big melt of 2012, which is the benchmark for Greenland thawing.

Then again, the weather patterns might change and the melting could slow.  The fact that melting started in some corners of Greenland in late April amid record warmth, and the thaw continued off and on through May and the first part of June is ominous.

Arctic sea ice extent is so far at record low levels for this time
of year. This trend might or might not continue, depending upon
weather conditions in July and August. 

The bulk of the summer season thaw in Greenland is in July. Now that there has already been some thawing, much of the freshest, whitest snow atop the ice has gone away.

That leaves relatively dirty ice exposed, which attracts more of the sun's heat than pure white stuff. Which in turns means the risk of faster melting.

This latest melting episode in Greenland seems to be a case of climate change teaming up with a natural weather pattern.

The dreaded negative phase of what is known as the North Atlantic Oscillation is going on at the moment.

That pattern creates warm, sunny high pressure systems to sit over Greenland (and at the same time pushing chilly air southward into the mid-latitudes. This can help make it cool and cloudy here in Vermont. I bet you noticed that during this spring.)

Climate change is probably making what would already have been an odd warm spell in Greenland a little bit warmer.

It's not just Greenland that's been a toasty Arctic spot lately. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level for mid-June since satellites started monitoring it in 1979, the Washington Post tells us.

Ice loss in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas along Alaska's northern coast is "unprecedented, said Rick Thoman, a Fairbanks-based climatologist.  Since so much water is already exposed, the sun will have a chance to warm the water, which could encourage further record-level ice melting  near the North Pole.

If a lot of ice melts in the Arctic Ocean, that won't raise sea levels like Greenland's melt would.  The melting Arctic Ocean ice is like ice cubes melting in your glass of gin and tonic. The water level won't change. Greenland's melt is like a colander filled with ice held over the glass. The thawing ice would drip into the glass, eventually causing it to overflow.

With or without climate change, Arctic weather is highly variable. There's always a chance the weather in the far north could turn cloudier and cooler for the rest of the summer. That would prevent this year from being another record melt, like 2012 was. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.

Antarctic Sea Ice Is Having A Rough Year, Too

A mountain near the western coast of Antarctica with a fractured
ice shelf to the left of it on the water. Ice shelves
are deteriorating in Antarctica, and that could mean
more global sea level rises. 

We've been watching the Arctic sea ice extent off and on all year in this here blog thingy because it's been struggling along at record lows, or near record lows most of the time.

That's not good news, of course, because the sea ice up there has been diminishing for decades, thanks in large part to global warming. That ice loss, in turn, might screw up northern hemispheric weather patterns.

For the record, the Arctic sea ice minimum for the season did not set a record low as some people expected, but after a quick start to the re-freeze season up there in September, lots of warm air has pushed into the Arctic in October, so the re-freeze has slowed down to a disconcerting crawl. 

There's a chance, perversely, that the low sea ice extent might be partly responsible for changes in the jet stream that have brought occasionally brutally cold and snowy winters to parts of North America and western Europe.

And now, let's take a look at the Antarctic, where things this year are not going so great, either. Ice extent there is among the lowest on record, which is a switch because the overall trend has been for increased ice extent around the Antarctic in recent decades.

Oh sure, some of the outer ice shelves have been eroding dangerously, but the overall sea ice has expanded somewhat, thanks to atmospheric circulation changes that caused upwelling of colder water around Antarctica that have promoted more easily freezable waters, notes Bob Henson at Weather Underground. 

Also, summertime melt water has increased from the Antarctic continent, reducing the salinity of the ocean water around there, making it easier to freeze.

This year, though, brought another shift in the weather patterns around Antarctica. It might be a one year deal, but it did break down the ice at the bottom of the Earth, that's for sure.

It remains to be seen if this year's low Antarctic ice extent is a one year shot, or the beginning of a trend.

A more worrisome development around Antarctica is the stability of the ice shelves.

Warmer ocean water seems to be chewing up the undersides of ice shelves along the coasts of Antarctica. These ice shelves act as dams that keep glaciers in place, or at least slow them down so they move at, um, a glacial pace down Antarctic slopes.

In the past, there's been basically an equilibrium. Some glacial ice makes it to the ocean and melts, but new ice is manufactured in the cold Antarctic interior, so all was good.

Since the ice shelves are melting more, that opens the door for the glaciers to move faster, going off into the sea and eventually melting.

The ice that comes down from the land and ends up in the ocean to melt is bad, because that contributes to global sea level rises. The new ice manufacturing process in Antarctica's interior can't keep up with the ice loss created by the newly speedy glaciers.

The problem can keep escalating because the more ice at the bottom of the ice shelf melts, the more is exposed to the warmer ocean water, and the melting just rolls on.

Still, the melting might have recently slowed a little bit, at least temporarily. The most intense ice shelf melting in Antarctica seems to have occurred between 2002 and 2009, notes NPR.

Even so, the fear is the melting will continue and the ice shelves in coastal Antarctic waters will collapse entirely, and the glaciers will flow toward the sea in a gallop. A gallop by glacial standards anyway.

That, in turn would accelerate sea level rises.

So yeah, people in toasty Miami and countless other coastal locations ought to care about what's going on in Antarctica. 

Nice Thing About Spring Snow Is It Melts Fast

There's still a little snow on the ground at my house in St. Albans, Vermont this morning, two days after a mid-April dump of 3.5 inches of new powder interrupted spring.

By late Thursday, only a little bit of the snow that fell
Tuesday night remained in my St Albans, Vermont yard.

But the rest will go today amid temperatures in the low 50s. The nice thing about spring snow is it melts fast under a strong sun.

To demonstrate, here's a cool time lapse video taken in April 2013 in Northfield, Minn. It shows 10 inches of April snow disappearing in 72 hours.

So, for areas of Minnesota and Wisconsin that got anywhere from six up to 20 inches of snow yesterday, there's hope spring will return.

Just watch the video:

Another Icky Rainstorm For Vermont, With A Little Ice

It's warmed up from that glancing, not so bad blow from the "polar vortex" earlier this week.

Will all the rain in the forecast make my
icy driveway in St. Albans worse, or will it
(hopefully!) melt some of the ice?   

With Friday temperatures in the upper 20s and low 30s you'd think this would be a nice set up for a pleasant snowfall instead of the rain and ice storms we've gotten so far this winter.

Think again.

A freezing rain advisory is up Saturday morning for all of Vermont, except for the Champlain Valley and Rutland County.

That freezing rain will probably ice up some roads Saturday morning, since they're so cold from that chilly weather we had earlier this week.  There won't be enough freezing rain to cause renewed power problems or tree damage, though, so there's that glimmer of good news.

However, it will really, REALLY warm up Saturday afternoon, reaching near 50 in some areas,  so the main threat is flooding.  Flood watches are up for all of Vermont except Grand Isle County.

Rainfal with this storm will amount to about an inch. That's fairly substantial for winter, but nothing horribly extreme.

The problem is, the ground is frozen. the moderately heavy rain will run off instead of soaking into the ground. . In some parts of Vermont, especially in the northwest, there's a thick layer of ice on top of the snow cover. That will encourage rain to run off, too, instead of soaking in.

So, all that water goes into those partly frozen rivers, the ice on those rivers will start to break up, and  there will be some ice jams. Plus, culverts and storm drains are clogged up with ice from those ice storms we had earlier this winter, so street flooding is going to be a problem.

All that ice underfoot has really been a problem for people trying to negotiate icy driveways and sidewalks and this won't really help. Rain makes the ice smooth and even more slippery. Some of the ice will melt, of course, and that's a good thing, but still.

It'll stay sort of mild in the Northeast through Tuesday. On Sunday and Monday, minor thawing will allow a bit more ice to melt, and some of the water from Saturday's storm to drain.

But there is the possibility of another soaking rain storm arrives Tuesday. Then it will turn colder, but not brutal. Instead of another round of below zero weather, we'll have pretty normal weather by the end of the week.

That means highs in the 25-30 range, and lows in the upper single numbers and teens. Not bad!

But I'm still waiting for that nice powdery dump of snow.