Still Kinda Gusty As Crews Work To Restore Power

White pine trees held up particularly poorly in
this week's windstorm. This one bit the
dust in Milton, Vermont.

As of early this morning, close to 39,000 Vermont homes and businesses were still without power in the wake of that tremendous wind storm we had Sunday  night and Monday morning.

The winds remained gusty overnight and as crews restored power to some areas, new outages were reported.

Here at my house in St. Albans, Vermont, the power was out for seven hours Monday morning, then returned. But it went out again for an hour or two last night. Now, knock on wood, it's back on.

Some people probably won't get their power back until the weekend, we're told. On the very bright side, there are so far no reports of deaths or serious injuries in Vermont because of what was a truly dangerous storm.

There's a couple things making this situation worse than it would otherwise be. These windstorms usually tend to focus on one section of the state, which means power companies can focus all their crews and attention there. But this storm caused big problems state wide. 

On top of that, most states have a mutual aid agreement. If a particular state has an especially bad storm, crews from neighboring states come in to help. Not this time. That's because all the surrounding states had their own big time problems and had no crews to spare.

New Hampshire, New York and Massachusetts has massive power failures and damage from the storm. In Maine, the power outages with this storm were worse than the legendary ice storm of 1998, which until now had been that state's benchmark for worst case scenario.

Those surrounding areas were also contending with flooding, and coastal damage. Boats broke loose and in some cases sank in Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Connecticut because of the storm.
Massachusetts and especially New Hampshire endured serious flooding.

There was still a flash flood watch in one section of northern New Hampshire this morning because there were questions about the structural integrity of a dam along the Androscoggin River. The Saco River went on a rampage Monday through Bartlett and Jackson, New Hampshire. There's a video at the bottom of this post of a house being carried away by a river in Warren, New Hampshire.

Some damage in Vermont is particularly bad. Seven Days says the Audubon Nature Center in Huntington, Vermont is close indefinitely because a falling tree smashed through their office and all the trails are impassable because of fallen branches and trees.

This is a particularly windy time of year, so more setbacks could yet come as a variety of weather systems and cold fronts come through.

Though the expected winds will not be nearly as strong as they were Monday morning, they could drop already weakened trees and power lines. Gusts to 30 mph or more are expected Thursday night and Friday, and we there's a risk of even stronger winds next Monday, perhaps in the 40 mph range.

We'll keep an eye on that for you.

 

Northeast Cold Wave: Record Lows, Dangerous Power Outages, Other Trouble

A huge highway pileup in Pennsylvania Saturday
caused by a snow squall associated with
the invasion of Arctic air into the Northeast.

There's no doubt we in New England are suffering through a particularly intense, dangerous cold wave this Valentine's Day.

It's going to get better, slowly at first, but much more rapidly on Monday.

But there's more weather trouble due Monday night and Tuesday. More on that in a minute.

First, the cold:

I was seeing some scary reports on Twitter and other media amid the cold this morning. There was an unconfirmed report of a truck through the Lake Champlain ice near Swanton, Vermont. That's something that might not end well, if it's true.

In Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, there was a dangeous power failure Sunday morning.

According to the Vermont Electric Cooperative web site, the power went out at around 3 a.m. for more than 1,400 homes and businesses in nine Northeast Kingdom towns and is not expected to be restored until 11 a.m. or so today.

A broken transmission pole, possibly caused by the cold weather, is to blame.

Temperatures early this morning in most of the affected towns were between 20 and 25 below, not including the wind chill.

The communities of Orleans and Barton were opening emergency shelters for people fleeing their frigid houses. And I think there's also going to be a lot of burst pipes in the homes with no electricity and heat.

Very Cold, And Many Record Lows

Temperatures across northern New England were in the upper teens to mid 20s below Sunday morning. I noticed Montpelier, Vermont at least tied its record low for the date of minus 19.

Arctic sea smoke in the bay, Scituate, Mass. this morning. 

In Watertown, New York, the temperature reached an awful 37 below.

Snow squalls associated with the Arctic cold front caused a highway pileup in Pennsylvania Saturday that killed three people. 

Southern New England and the New York City area were setting more impressive records.

Boston got down to at least 9 below, the coldest temperature on any date there since 1957, and the coldest February morning there since 1943.

New York City reached minus 1, a record low for the date and its coldest morning since 1994.

Block Island, off the southern coast of Rhode Island, set a record this morning for its coldest morning on record, for any date. It was minus 4 there.

The extreme cold in southern New England and the New York area led to some unusual warnings. There was a heavy freezing spray warning for Long Island Sound this morning.

Such a warning is fairly common in places like the waters off Alaska, but I don't remember the last time we had one in Long Island Sound.

Freezing spray warnings are issued when it's really cold and waves spray up onto boats and freeze. According to the National Weather Service,  "it is recommended that mariners not trained to operate in these conditions or vessels not properly equipped to do so remain in port or avoid the warning area."

Still A Warm Winter.

The odd thing is despite the extreme New England cold this weekend, this winter could still easily be the warmest on record for many towns in the region, or it will at least score in the top 5.

For instance, if the forecast for today and tomorrow in Burlington, Vermont is anywhere near accurate, the month of February will still be running about a degree and a half warmer than normal overall by the end of the day Monday.

After that, we'll have a few days of near or above normal temperatures. Who knows what the rest of the month will entail, but at Burlington, if February as a whole is ends up at just a little less than a degree warmer than normal overall, the winter of 2015-16 will still be the warmest on record.

It'll stay bitterly cold in New England today, but there are signs that the beginning of the end of the cold wave is coming.

The frigid air was caused by a lobe of the polar vortex working its way all the way down to New England Saturday. That's why southern New England and New York was so cold relative to normal.

The air over us came straight from the North Pole and northern Greenland, and due to the polar vortex lobe,  modified little on its trip down to see us.

A measure of the degree of the cold wave, and whether or not its fading, is to look at temperatures a few thousand feet overhead

Mount Washington, New Hampshire is a good place to take such a sample At around 10 p.m. last night, Mount Washington's temperature bottomed out at 38 below, its coldest temperature since March, 2007

By 7 a.m. this morning, the temperature there was up to 26 below. That's still obviously frigid, but the scant warming is a sign that the polar vortex lobe was weakening and starting to head away off to the northeast.

Down in the New England valleys, it'll still be frigid today and tonight, but not as bad as yesterday afternoon and last night.

Then the warmup really takes hold Monday, making way for a very messy storm Tuesday

The Upcoming Storm: 

Winter storm warnings extend from Kentucky, through much of Virginia and parts of West Virginia for tonight into Monday. A storm is sweeping southeastward through the Midwest into the Southeast, and is starting to interact with the cold air to produce snow and mixed precipittion.

The storm will head toward the coast, and head almost due north toward New England. It will sweep some warm air northward with it, so precipitation in the Northeast Monday night will start out as snow, then change to sleet and freezing rain, then rain in many areas.

A lot of this precipitation will come down pretty hard, too, since a lot of moisture is available to the storm.

Some areas will have quite a temperature whiplash. As noted, it was 0 in New York City this morning. By Tuesday afternoon, it will probably be about 50 degrees there. The change in Boston will be even more impressive: It will go from 9 below this morning to forecast high of 55 Tuesday.

Even where precipitation changes to rain and air temperatures get above freezing in New York and New England Tuesday, the rain could freeze in many areas as it hits the ground. Pavement, streets and sidewalks have been thoroughly chilled by this Arctic blast.

So rain could easily freeze even if the air is at something like 35 or 38 degrees. This would lead to a false sense of security among both motorists and pedestrians. "Hey its 37 degrees! The roads can't be icy," people will think. But trust me, the roads will be very icy in spots.

In the interior Northeast, like in northwestern New England, western New York and western Pennsylvania, there's still some question as to how much snow will fall, when the precipitation will change to a mix or rain, and how much of each kind of precipitation will fall.

Just plan on a really, REALLY messy day on Tuesday and leave at that for now.

It's The West Coast's Turn To Get A Huge Stormy Blast

Satellite view of the "Pineapple Express"
storm pounding California today  

I've been harping on the slow, strange storm that has dumped heavy wet snow on parts of New England and New York the past couple of days -- 30,000 homes and businesses STILL without power in Vermont as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

Meanwhile, though, an even more intense storm is raging on the West Coast.

As of this afternoon, 220,000 California homes and businesses had no electricity in the face of huge winds and torrential downpours.

This is a classic "Pineapple Express" storm that' snow smacking California. The state has had what some say is the worst drought in 1,200 years (!!) so these storms have been few and far between.

The one hitting California now is probably the strongest one to hit the state since 2009.

A Pineapple Express storm is so named because this type of system grabs a fistful of tropical moisture from near Hawaii and arranges it into a fairly narrow atmospheric river that makes a beeline to the California coast.

Normally, this type of storm is a bad thing. A Pineapple Express usually causes damaging winds, torrential, destructive flooding rains and blizzards up in the Sierra Nevada.

This storm is doing all these things, but of course there's a major silver lining this year: The rain is indeed coming down too hard, too fast, and will create flooding.

Kids play on a shopping cart in flooded Healdsburg, CA.
Photo by Eric Risberg/AP  

But it's also putting a dent in the epic drought I've mentioned. They had a pretty good rainstorm last week, which moisten the ground and greened things up a little bit.

The storms over the past week or two in California haven't really translated into filling near-empty reservoirs. The last rains sort of just soaked into the ground and didn't run off much.

As Eric Holthaus in Slate points out, now that the ground is a little wetter, this storm is apt to cause some runoff, and fill the reservoirs a little bit.

It won't solve all of the drought woes in California. But it will help.

Another good thing about this storm: It's going to be a slightly colder one than the last one.

California depends on a deep snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains to gradually melt off in the spring, feeding drinking water supplies and agriculture in the valleys below.

But California has had near record warmth lately, continuing a trend that's gone on all year. The last storm was very warm, and it rained in most of the Sierra Nevada range. So they don't yet have a good start on building a snow pack.

This time, it is snowing big time in the Sierra. A blizzard warning is up for those mountains.

It's wild up there today. One high elevation weather station reported a gust of 147 mph. A few other high elevation spots reported gusts of between 80 and 110 mph.

One of the biggest concerns is the heavy rain falling on areas that endured forest fires amid the drought this year.

The fires left no vegetation left to soak up some of the heavy rain, and no roots to hold soil in place. So in the fire areas, there is a great fear of mudslides, debris flows and flash flooding. 

One more bright side to all this California storminess: The big waterfalls at Yosemite National Park are flowing again, after being dry for much of the summer and autumn.