Snow Squalls And Whiteouts A Big Risk Around Vermont Today

A heavy snow squall in Burlington, Vermont a few years ago. 

For the third time in a week, snow squalls will make things challenging in and around Vermont today.

The snow squalls coming up will probably really be business, and be quite a bit worse than the ones last Thursday and Sunday.

Everything is coming together to make the snow squalls a lot like a summertime line of strong to severe thunderstorms.  Except of course it will snow.

A strong Arctic cold front is approaching from the west.  There's a lot of instability in the air ahead of it, so there will be lots of sharp updrafts to create towering clouds, like the kind you get with thunderstorms. The cold front is grabbing a bunch of moisture from the Great Lakes to supply the snowfall.

No guarantees, but there's actually a very slight chance that some of us will get thundersnow today.

The squalls will probably organize into a line or lines of squalls heading west to east across the region today. They won't last super long in any one place, but while you're in them it will be nasty.  The snow will come down really, really hard, the wind will pick up to maybe 40 mph in gusts, so the snow will blow around a lot.  Expect whiteouts, which are terribly dangerous on the highways.

Across the northern half of Vermont, yesterday's snowfall overproduced and accumulated more than expected. Now there is a few inches of very fluffy snow on the ground. (There's close to five inches of it in my St. Albans yard.)

That fluffy snow will also blow around, worsening the whiteouts.

The timing of these, very roughly, is as follows, as estimated by the National Weather Service: The squalls will be crossing the Adirondacks around noon, enter northwest Vermont after 1 p.m., rocking across the Champlain Valley around 2 p.m. or so, then continuing east and getting into the Connecticut River Valley and towards New Hampshire around 5 p.m. or a little after.

Since at least some of these squalls sound like they're going to be particularly intense, don't go out driving in them.  The National Weather Service in South Burlington will probably be issuing snow squall warnings as they approach.  Listen for these because they are super helpful. Snow squall warnings are much like severe thunderstorm warnings in the summer, and cover only a county or a few counties at a time.

These warnings will tell you when the squalls are expected to arrive, so you'll have a chance to sort of hunker down where you are until after they pass. You probably don't want to be out on the highways when they hit.

Snow accumulations will be hard to measure with all the wind, but most of us will get no more than one to three inches. As I said, the snow squalls won't last long, so the heavy snow won't have a chance to linger over one spot and dump big amounts.  It's the wind and blowing snow that will getcha.

Wouldn't you know I get out of work around 2 p.m., then I have to get the dogs from the kennel and drive home with them right around the time things are likely to be the worst in the Champlain Valley. I'll probably have to take my own advice and wait it out until after the snow squalls clear.

Let's hope there's no pileups on the highways before the Vermont Agency of Transportation plows and salt shakers clean up after the snow squalls.

Since this is an Arctic cold front, expect temperatures to start feeling, well, Arctic. It'll get much colder very fast behind the cold front and squalls.  Wind chills will be a factor this evening, overnight and into Thursday.

The wind chills at their worst tonight and Thursday will be in the teens and 20s below zero.

Tornado Outbreak Kills 3, Causes Huge Damage, And Alters Storm Forecast In Northeast.

A tornado destroyed this school Monday in Alexandria, Louisiana
Image from KALB

Monday's tornado outbreak in the South killed at least three people and caused millions of dollars in property damage.  But as they always say, it could have been worse.

Warnings were excellent as the powerful tornadoes moved through, and those warnings saved lives.

One such example was in Alexandria, Louisiana, which was in the path of a strong tornado with a long track of 63 miles.  In that path was the Hope Baptists School and Church, where 18 kids and their teachers were in classrooms as the storm approached.

According to television station KALB, teachers in the school received phone alerts of the approaching tornado.  The teachers hustled the children to a safer church sanctuary next door. Moments later, the school collapsed in the tornado. The sanctuary was also badly damaged, but everybody was by then hiding in protected corners of the building.

The complex was destroyed, but nobody was hurt. Just after the tornado, emergency responders  took the kids to a nearby, undamaged building where parents picked them up.

Not everyone was so lucky. A husband and wife in Town Creek, Alabama were killed by a tornado and several others hurt, according to the Weather Channel, citing an Associated Press report. 

So far, there are 37 reports of preliminary reports of tornadoes in the Deep South.

There is a history of terrible December tornadoes in the South.  A twister hit Tuscaloosa, Alabama on December 16, 2000, killing 16 people. Several rounds of southern tornadoes in December, 2015 killed 20 people.  The deadliest December tornado on record killed 38 people in Vicksburg, Missisippi on December 5, 1953.  (That was the end of a terrible tornado year in which powerful tornadoes killed hundreds of people in Texas, Michigan and Massachusetts.)

The large number of tornadoes and violent thunderstorms Monday pumped a lot of latent heat into the atmosphere, which has helped pump up a high pressure ridge off the East Coast. That is affecting the snow and ice storm hitting the Northeast today.

It doesn't change the forecast much for the northern two thirds of Vermont (One to three inches north, three to five inches of snow south).  But the extra heat and moisture in the atmosphere might boost snow totals in southern Vermont and New Hampshire up to or even beyond six inches.

And that extra heat floating around as a "gift" from yesterday's thunderstorms are creating   more favorable conditions for a lot of freezing rain in parts of southern New England, New York, New Jersey and Pensylvania. It was already a total mess in these areas early this morning.

Here's a video of a close miss tornado to the video maker's house. Her name is Heather Welch. Early on in the video you can see large debris falling and trees toppling as the twister made its closest approach to the camera person.

I probably would not have been standing under those trees. When a tornado just passes, you get something called a rear flank downdraft, which can contain powerful winds that would easily topple trees and cause additonal damage, even away from the tornado's direct path:



Another large tornado near Bogue Chitto, Mississippi:



This aftermath video of the Hope Baptist School in ??? is scary because of what could have happened to all the kids inside. Video shows the destruction and children being evacuated:

Breaking: Tornado Swarm Developing In Louisiana and Mississippi

Radar images indicated what appeared
to be a strong tornado on radar
heading toward Alexandria, Louisiana.
Note on the lower image the opposing
bright colors close to each other
indicating a tornado.

As of 1:30 Eastern Time, there have been several reports of tornadoes on Louisiana and into western Mississippi.

Details are sparse right now because this is just the beginning of a tornadic afternoon in these areas. But radar images indicate at least one or two strong tornadoes. They show "debris balls" which is debris being lofted high into the air. 

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center says a corridor in central Louisiana is now open for the development of strong tornadoes.

For the rest of the day, eastern Louisiana and western and central Mississippi seem most at risk for strong, dangerous tornadoes.

One especially dangerous looking tornado (at least on radar) was heading toward Alexandria, Louisiana, population about 47,000 as of 1:40 p.m. Eastern Time.

There is sometimes a severe tornado outbreak in the Deep South in December as strong storm systems pass through. For most of the nation, though, tornadoes are most likely in the spring and summer.

I'm sure there will be more news on this later as reporters on the ground give us storm and damage updates. Stay safe down there!

Interstate Highways Are Snow Traps

Cars stuck on a steep hill during a March, 2017 blizzard in front of
my St. Albans, Vermont house.  Luckily for the drivers, this isn't a
limited access highway like Interstate 89, so the motorists were able
to use my driveway and those of my neighbors to turn around.
They weren't stuck for hours like they would have been on the Interstate.

Here's one of those problems in which no good solutions come to mind: Snowy crashes on Interstate highways that trap motorists for hours.

Under normal conditions, the United States Interstate Highway system moves people and goods efficiently from one place to another.

Along with us dweebs in cars and small trucks, zillions of tractor trailers zip back and forth delivery goods and supplies to zillions of places and people.

Until it snows.

There's no good mechanism for getting people moving again when tractor trailers jack knife on ice, or cars slide off the highways and into ditches or other cars.

Such was the case last evening, when a snow squall froze a previously just wet section of Interstate 89 between Burlington and Montpelier. The Interstate was basically a parking lot from mid afternoon into the evening because of this mess, reports WCAX-TV.  The traffic jam continued hours after the snow squall had ended, demonstrating how hard it is to untangle an Interstate highway crash.

Elsewhere yesterday, parts of Interstate 80 in Nebraska, Interstate 35 near Kansas City and Interstate 70 southeast of Manhattan, Kansas were closed due to a snowstorm Sunday, the Weather Channel reported.

More closures are possible as the storm heads northeast into the Ohio Valley and eventually southern New England.

Snow squalls are the worst, because they cause rapid changes in road conditons and sudden white out conditions.  That's still a threat here in Vermont Wednesday, which would make it the third time in a week that heavy snow squalls either shut down parts of Vermont highways or threatened to.  Wednesday's snow squalls here in Vermont might be the worst of the bunch. (There were problems with snow squalls last Thursday and again yesterday.)

The limited access of Interstate highways that make them safer with no cars merging from side streets.  But the only way to get cars trapped behind snowy wrecks, or any kind of wreck is to wait until the mess is cleaned up so people can progress to the next exit at least.

Sometimes, people are directed into those little patches of asphalt connecting opposite lanes of highways where cops wait for speeders. Then the motorists can go basically U-turn back toward their starting point but that takes a long time to accomplish too.

Police and first responders must give priorty to getting the injured to hospitals, investigating the cause of the crash, and getting things cleared in a safe manner that doesn't cause more injuries.  Plus, they often don't have the manpower to figure out a way to move all the stuck traffic behind the wrecks.

That's why people are often stuck for hours behind Interstate crashes. They're not the highest priority, I'm afraid.

My advice, and it isn't perfect:  Make sure you have a full tank of gas, especially in the winter, before you venture out.  If they say snow squalls are on the way or are already here, stay home.  Try to listen or hunt for traffic alerts so you can avoid gummed up areas.

As we enter a winter full of ice storms, snowstorms and snow squalls, you, too might be stuck on the Interstate for a long time.  They only way to manage it is to be prepared.

This Coming Week Super Busy For All Of Us: Here's Weather We'll Deal With

It'll probably look like this occasionally in
Vermont as people rush to get their Christmas
stuff done. 

Today through next weekend is a frantic time for many of us as we get ready for Christmas. There's decorations to keep putting up, there's a lot of holiday shopping and errands to do, parties you either want to or have to go to, or you have to travel.

By next weekend, right before Christmas, I hope things will settle down for you and me. But meanwhile, we Vermonters, as always, have weather to deal with.

So here's a brief day by day breakdown of what you'll have to deal with in the Green Mountain State. Luckily, there's nothing too extreme coming down the pike, but it is Vermont.

There are complications. Also note as we look at things later and later in the week, things might change from current forecasts. But we have a good idea generally what will happen

TODAY (Sunday).  Expect lots of wind.  Pretty much all except western Vermont north of Bennington County is under a wind advisory today for gusts reaching 50 mph.  Even in relativel "calm" areas, like the Champlain Valley, winds will go to 40 mph or higher.

There will probably be a few power outages, especially in the eastern half of Vermont because of the wind.  The ground is quite saturated, so the wind will more easily push over shallow rooted trees.  Today is not a good day to install outdoor Christmas decorations. And for gawd's sake deflate those damn blow up decorations so they don't blow all over the place.

MONDAY: This will be a quiet, relatively calm day to get things done.  The sun will be out a good part of the time, and the wind will be much lighter than it is today. It'll be chilly, but nothing scary for mid-December with highs somewhere in the 20s.

TUESDAY:  A little bit of trouble for your Tuesday.  A mid-size storm will be passing by to our south, and that will throw some snow into Vermont.  This is subject to change, but as of Sunday, forecast trends have pushed the storm further south than first thought a couple of days ago.

If this trend holds, southern Vermont would get the most snow, with maybe six inches in some favored spot.  Northern Vermont could get as little as one to three inches. There still are uncertainties on how this storm will play out, so stay tuned for possible changes in the  snow forecasts. It could still go up or down.

Note that this same storm is likely to cause severe thunderstorms and possible tornadoes in the Deep South Monday. Plus, for those of you who are traveling, there's a lot of risk for a bunch of freezing rain from Oklahoma to southern New England as this storm travels cross-country.

It could get particularly nasty in southern New England, southern New York, Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey on Tuesday. It's probably a good idea to avoid those areas on Tuesday if you can.

WEDNESDAY: At least part of the day could prove to be, um, interesting here in Vermont. It'll start off quiet enough, but a sharp cold front will raise the risk of heavy, potentially dangerous snow squalls. Kind of like what we had last Thursday, but possibly even worse.

It's not definite that we'll get the snow squalls, but there's a lot of players coming together that could produce them.  If you're venturing out Wednesday, listen to forecasts first.  The National Weather Service in South Burlington and other Vermont meterologists are pretty damn good at timing these things out.

It's too soon now to say when or even if those snow squalls will develop, but pay attention to forecasts all day Wednesday.  That'll give you a sense when whiteouts and dangerous road conditions are most likely.

THURSDAY: Quiet and very cold for this time of year, though it won't be a record breaker. It looks like highs will only be in the teens to around 20 with lows a few degrees either side of zero. At least that's how it looks now.

FRIDAY: Still quiet and cold. A risk of a subzero morning, but temperatures should moderate a bit by afternoon.   It'll still be chilly, but highs in the 20s aren't all that bad.

Let's Go Back To Australia For More Weather Drama

A recent wildfire near Perth Stadium in western Australia. An incoming
heat wave will only make things worse.  Photo: AFP via BBC.

Summer has barely started in Australia, and the extremes are just coming fast and furious down under.

We've already mentioned the massive wildfires hitting large parts of the nation/continent. To make matters worse, a long lasting, intense heat wave is now moving into pretty much all of Australia, which is very roughly the size of the United States, excluding Alaska.

Perth in far western Australia, and Melbourne, in the southeast are expecting high temperatures of around 105 degrees this coming week, according to the BBC.  There's even a chance Australia could break the record for its all time hottest temperature, which is 123.3 degrees.

And there have been incredible thunderstorms, producing massive hailstones that have pummeled and wrecked countless cars, roofs and windows, and flash flooding that have quickly inundated neighborhoods. Some areas around Brisbane got as much as five inches of rain in a little more than an  hour.

Before you say that at least the storms are dropping rain to squelch all those wildfires, think again. The storms, intense as they are, have been quite localized, causing patches of severe damage, but not wetting down most of the landscape. So the fires burn on.

Image from the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
shows a big upward trend in that nation's temperatures.

Still, areas around Brisbane got a little drought relief from the storms, so that's a small area of good news in hot, burning Australia. However, areas in southeastern Australia below Brisbane with the most intense fires got little or no rain.

The incoming heat wave will also dry out any place that did manage to get some rain and hail, increasing the risk of wildfires.

If you think I've been harping on Australian heat and fires every winter (their summer), you're right. Like most of the rest of the world. Australia is heating up with climate change, so the summers are generally hotter there. That, in turn, helps make the bush fires, bigger, more intense and longer lasting.

Even if the heat and drought are briefly interrupted by thunderstorms, destructive as they may be, they're generally not enough to overcome the effects of the summer heat

Here's a hailstorm wrecking a roof of one Australian house in the past couple of days:



News report on the Brisbane storm. Mixed emotions, clearly. Happy for the drought-relieving rain, not so much for the flash flooding:



Meanwhile, in New Zealand, heavy rains caused this huge cliff to collapse. Hope nobody was standing beneath it!

Stormy Vermont Weekend, But Nothing Like Iceland!

Flooding in Johnson, Vermont from the October 31/November 1 storm
this year.  A storm that will look similar on weather maps to this
one will hit Vermont this weekend, but the real-life effects will
NOT be nearly as bad as the previous storm.  Photo by Jenn Chittick.

The bad news is we are in for a rather stormy weekend here and in the rest of New England.  The good news is that although the storm will be similar in some ways to that destructive flood and wind storm at Halloween, it won't be nearly as bad.

This weekend's storm will look a lot like the storm two months ago on weather maps. But it will look radically different here on the ground. If there's damage this time, it will be quite light.  

Also, it won't be nearly as bad as a storm that swept through Iceland a few days ago. I'll get into that in a bit.

First, the weekend storm here in New England.

The first problem will come this evening in the form of a very light drizzle or freezing drizzle. That doesn't sound too bad at all, but remember, it takes just a tiny bit of ice to make roads very dangerous.  This evening's ice will mostly affect eastern Vermont and the Adirondacks. It will also be mainly a problem on untreated roads and sidewalks.

It's looking like the Champlain Valley will be a tad too warm for the drizzle to freeze, so that's good.

Overnight and Saturday morning, the storm will produce a hefty slug of rain. It will be setup sort of  like that Halloween storm, with rain riding north amid lots of moisture coming in from the south. This will be ahead of the storm's cold front.

I do want to emphasize that on the weather map, this will be somewhat similar to Halloween, but for those of us on the ground who have to live with it, this will clearly NOT be nearly as big a problem.'

Many of us could get an inch or even more of rain in some spots out of this.  But there's not much snow on the ground to melt, so that won't add much to the runoff.  And the expected rainfall totals are a lot less than the two to five inches we got on October 31.

The bottom line is there will probably be areas of minor flooding across Vermont and surrounding areas, so you will want to watch out for that.  You won't want to drive over flooded roads, and avoid any flooding in general. But this certainly won't be the disaster we experienced a couple months ago.

There is a somewhat higher risk of flooding from this storm over far eastern New England, where rainfall is expected to be heavier than in Vermont.

Rain will probably turn lighter and more showery Saturday afternoon, but then pick up a little more Saturday evening all the way into Sunday.  This rain will turn to mostly a wet snow overnight Saturday into Sunday morning. Accumulations will be light, but the mountains might pick up a few inches.

Snow showers will probably continue all day Sunday, but they won't amount to anything, really, in the valleys.  There will be a bit more accumulations when you go uphill, especially along the western slopes of the Green Mountains.

Also, in a way that was similar to the October 31-November 1 storm, the wind will really crank on the back side of the storm on Sunday.

Again, it won't be nearly as bad as it was a couple months ago. But wet soils and gusty west winds will make it easy for shallow rooted trees to topple, much like they did on November 1.

Since winds will be lighter than they were then, the chaos of widespread power failures looks unlikely. Still, some people will lose power, and tree branches and even a few trees on Sunday amid the gusty winds.

The worst of the winds look like they will be on the east slopes of the Green Mountains and Adirondacks.

There's no rest for the weary. Another storm looks like it will come through on Tuesday with a batch of snow and/or mixed precipitation. It's too soon to figure out how extensive that storm might be.


HUGE ICELAND STORM

Iceland, a country I'd like to visit due to its cool geography, is not a place to visit in the winter.

It's dark, cold and stormy up there, as you might imagine for an island that far up in the North Atlantic.

The Capitol, Reykjavik, actually has average temperatures this time of year similar to Vermont's. (Although summers are much, much cooler in Iceland than in Vermont.)

Winter storms, however, are much stronger in Iceland than here in the Green Mountain State, and they just got hit by an immense doozy.

As the Washington Post and other media outlets report, Winds gusted as high as 149 mph on at least one location in Iceland, and sustained winds were at 63 mph in Reykjavik.

The nation of about 360,000 people was also hit by up to ten feet of snow.  Most places had much less than that, but it was hard to measure, given that the winds were so strong.

The storm was probably the worst in ten years.  Most roads were impassable because of snowdrifts.  This in a North Atlantic nation that should be used to winter weather.

Iceland is positioned in a spot that naturally makes it stormy.  Iceland is as far north as southern Greenland, northern Canada and central Alaska.  So yeah, it's close to the North Pole.
'
But the warm Gulf Sream in the Atlantic Ocean passes northeastward just off the eastern Icelandic coast. That explains why Iceland is relatively mild in winter, given how far north it is.  Yet it's sofar north that extreme cold lurks nearby.

That contrast helps fuel powerful storms, like the one they got this week.

Some videos. The first one looks unpleasant enough:



Here's a view from inside an Icelandic Coast Guard vessel:



I do like how nonchalant people in Iceland are in storms. Here's a video of Reykjavik as the storm was bearing down.  It looked nice. Despite the snow, cold and strong winds, a guy was walking around in shorts, a busker played guitar on a corner, and parking was tight as people enjoyed holiday season shops and restaurants: