Too Bad The Ski Areas Are Closed.......

Brookfield, Vermont yesterday

As the cool spring weather continues in Vermont, the snow periodically keeps coming. For  most of us, when it has snowed in the past couple of weeks, the snow cover has melted pretty fast.

For instance, you saw that snowy scene in yesterday's post from a web cam grab along Interstate 89 in Brookfield. As of early this morning, almost all that snow was gone, and the remainder will have disappeared by this afternoon, I'm sure.

I bet yesterday's snow winner in Vermont, a fairly high spot in Ludlow, with 4.8 inches of fresh, albeit wet powder, will lose the remaining snow today.

It's harder to melt the snow above say, 2,500 or 3,000 feet, so the high elevations are still pretty deep in winter.   If you look toward the Green Mountains and Adirondacks during today's sunshine, you'll see a lot of snow up there.

As of yesterday, the summit of Mount Mansfield still had 70 inches of snow on the ground. Spring is a long way off there.  Believe it or not, while that amount of snow at that 3,900 foot elevation measuring site is above normal, compared to the average of 53 inches, this is nowhere near a record depth for the end of April.

All this is according to a cool, useful, interactive site by Matthew Parilla. You can compare the current snow depth up there to this date in past years. (And other dates).  Probably the latest arrivin and worst spring up on Mount Mansfield was the notoriously wintry spring of 1971.  On this date that year, there was still 106 inches of snow near the Mount Mansfield summit, according to the data Parilla has.

Right about now is when the snow depth atop Mount Mansfield just begins to crash.  It normally falls very fast through May, and by early June, it's all gone .

And Brookfield, Vermont this morning. Doesn't take long for
snow to melt this time of year, except on the mountain peaks

True to form, the next good storm, coming at the end of this week, looks like it will be rain, even at the summits.  The relatively warm weather during this expected half inch to an inch of rain will melt high elevations snows, for sure. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

That's why the National Weather Service in South Burlington is keeping an eye out for some minor flooding possible Friday or Saturday.

They're saying there will be sharp rises in river levels in Vermont due to the rain and melting high elevation snow. At this point though, if there is any flooding, which is iffy, it will be pretty much minor, nuisance stuff.

Believe it or not, there could well be a period centered around May 12 and 13 in which the snow cover goes back up in Vermont's mountains.

Long range forecasts are notoriously dicey, but if these are to be believed, another near record spell of cold weather and snow could strike Vermont then.  I'm definitely NOT saying it will happen, but unfortunately, it's possible.  Ma Nature might just have it in for our gardens, huh?

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

Are You Missing Snow? Plenty Still Out West

Looks like January, but this is a frozen high elevation lake in
California's Sierra Nevada mountains in mid-May 

The last of the snow on top of Mount Mansfield has (IS) finally disappeared.

The snow was unusually deep up there during the late winter and spring, and a cool April and May meant that it melted slowly.  As of Saturday, there was still one inch of snow at the stake near the top of Mount Mansfield.

So it's just about gone. I imagine it wil disappear in today's warmth.

Of course, if you get even more snow than Mount Mansfield, the white covering lasts a lot longer.

Which, if you're already missing snow,  takes us to the mountains in the western United States. The water content of the snow lingering in the Colorado mountains is more than six times the average for early June, says the Weather Channel.

Only three other years since 1979 had a higher snowpack in the upper Colorado and South Platte River basins, says the National Weather Service in Boulder, Colorado.

The Sierra Nevada range in California still has two to four times the early June average snow pack.  As of June 5 or so, a measuring station at Leavitt Lake still had 141 inches of snow on the ground.

An estimated 150 lakes above the elevation of 7,000 feet are still frozen.  At least three ski areas, Mammoth Mountain, Squaw Valley and Donnor Ski Ranch are still open. Mammoth Mountain expects to stay open into early August.

Some new snow managed to fall in some areas of the Northwest and in Canada last week. Snow dusted high elevations of Idaho, Montana and Oregon Thursday, with snow reported at elevations as low as 4,800 feet in Oregon.

As much as four inches of snow fell near Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The West is warming up dramatically this week, so snow melt will also ramp up big time.  Excessive heat alerts are in effect Monday and Tuesday for lower elevations of California and parts of Oregon Monday and Tuesday.

That of course means it will be pretty toasty up in the Sierra Nevada, too. People are being warmed that streams and rivers coming out of the Sierra will rise dramatically each night as runoff reaches lower elevations.  Campers and hikers are being told to stay on high ground, away from any potential flooding.

These rivers will also be flowing wildly, and have very cold water. After all, it's coming from melting snow. People are being told to stay away from these rivers and creeks, as the cold water will kill them quickly if they fall in.

Similar warnings due to mountain snowmelt are in effect in Colorado, Utah and Montana.

Yet MORE Snow, Especially Northern Vermont, Later Today, Tonight

As expected, snow squalls developed in many areas of
Vermont and surrounding states Friday. I encountered
this one as I left work in Burlington, Vermont late
Friday afternoon. 

For those of you in Vermont, particularly northern sections, you might have woken up this morning to at least patches of blue sky. The days long period of almost continuous snow accumulation is over, right?  

Wrong. Totally wrong. Especially if you live in the northern Green Mountains.

That decaying nor'easter that's lingered in southeastern Quebec and northern Maine is still hanging around.

Another wave of moisture is rotating around this system. And the wind is orienting itself to bring an upslope snowfall to parts of northern New York and especially the central and northern Green Mountains.

An upslope snow is when moist winds rise up and over the mountains. When the air rises like that, the moisture gets wrung out as precipitation, in this case, snow.

This scenario has been contemplated for days, as varying forecasts over the past few days either said the northern mountains would get a huge dump with this, or hardly anything at all.

It turns out this will be a relatively small dump for most areas of the central and northern Green Mountains, with some areas doing quite well, especially up near Jay Peak.  All this is enough snow to qualify for a winter weather advisory for far northern Vermont away from Lake Champlain.  

There's going to be a sharp gradient in new snowfall between Lake Champlain and the northern Greens. On the lakeshore, there will probably be only a dusting. By the time you get into towns along the western slopes like Underhill, Cambridge, Bakersfield, parts of Enosburg, that kind of thing, we're talking four to eight inches of new snow by Sunday morning.

Parts of the high elevations of the Northeast Kingdom, places like Walden, Sutton, Sheffield, will also probably get a lot of snow out of this.

Some favored mountain peaks could get as much as a foot. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Jay Peak.

Parts of the Adirondacks will probably get a few inches of snow, too.

The far southern Green Mountains, where three feet of snow fell Wednesday night, will probably only get a couple inches of new snow out of this.

On Friday, snow squalls developed across New York State, parts of Vermont and southern New England as expected. Nobody got huge amounts of new snow, which was predicted. But a few places picked up a few inches, especially in the mountains.

Burlington, Vermont, which hasn't exactly gotten the most snow of anybody so far this month, is still running ahead of normal for snowfall for March so far. There's been 13.6 inches of snow so far this month, which is nearly eight inches above normal.

Snowfall for the season, after falling below normal during the record warm second half of February, is back to a bit above normal for this point in the season in Burlington. They've gotten 68 inches since the start of winter.

A little more snow is coming there, too. Burlington should get a bit of snow out of this tonight.

Next week, it's still looking like that nor'easter will miss us (but we'll keep an eye on it anyway because it's still possible it could veer toward the west and affect us.) But regardless, the weather pattern still favors lots of snow showers next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Happy Hints For Vermont Snow Lovers

Usually by mid-October, the mountains peaks in Vermont have been dusted with white, the first harbingers of the usual snowy winters we get.

OK, it won't look like this in Vermont this weekend,
but the mountain peaks might finally get a dusting of snow.  

Not this year.

So far, there's been little or no snow at all in the mountains.  The first snow of the season in Vermont's mountains is running a little late.

That's about to change, but before you get your skis or snowboards out of the closet, relax. We're not in for a big storm, yet.

However, the weather pattern is changing, and by this weekend and early next week, we'll be a fitful, chilly, unsettled period, with clouds, some sun, some showers, and yes, mountain snows.

The highest peaks will probably get a dusting to a couple inches in some of these snow showers starting Saturday night.  Valley dwellers will probably have to wait a little longer for snow, as those places will just get some chilly rain showers.

Your time will come. Eventually.