Good garden variety event shaping up for 19th/20th as March cold expected to continue

Saturday's weather system should bring an additional 1-4 inches (highest above the Mid-Station) but it will be a considerably warmer event. Temperatures may hover just above the freezing mark at the base and near 30 high on the hill. Incredibly, Saturday will actually be one of the warmer days of the next week or more. March of 2014 is setting up to be one of the coldest in Vermont going back 50 years. Readings are anywhere between 9 and 12 degrees below normal for the first 13 days of March and well below normal temperatures are expected for the remainder of the month. The deep snow cover across the central and northern part of the state will help accentuate the behavior. The region also has a chance to see a great month of snow. The Wednesday/Thursday epic storm helped and I fully expect more events in what appears to be a fruitful pattern. I was talking to Eric just the other day about our tendency to psychologically tune out winter by late March but often times the combination of a deep healthy base along with some great powder (and tolerable temperatures) occurs right during this period.

Saturday's light snow event is followed by more very unusual late-winter cold. High temperatures will only be in the teens both Sunday and Monday and below zero early Monday (frozen green beer weather !). A storm early in the week will travel well to the south of Vermont but another one will quickly follow on its heels and spread clouds and snow back into the region Wednesday. There has been some back and forth on the medium range models about where the snow/wintry mix line sets up Wednesday and Wednesday night, but from my vantage point, we have a good shot at a solid garden variety snow event with several inches by first tracks time Thursday the 20th. Generally below freezing temperatures follow this storm for Friday and into the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd.

In spite of very little support from some of our favorite teleconnection indices, the jet stream in the Pacific is expected to loosen during the last week of March. The core of some of the coldest air in the entire Northern Hemisphere is expected to settle into eastern Canada. If you are anxiously waiting for spring, you are likely going to have to continue to wait. If your looking for 10 more ski days and a few more powder days, you are in luck. We probably are going to see another significant snowstorm in this period along with 1-2 outbreaks of some serious relative cold.