Rain should be over by early Thursday but major snowfall remains more than a week away

Still struggling to find good news for the 5th straight day. It's quite astounding actually; and speaking sentimentally, I am about ready to take this season straight to the latrine same as about everyone else. After the nearly inch of rain Wednesday night, a break in the precipitation can be expected for Thursday though temperatures will remain above freezing for most of the day. Snow rotates back into the region late Thursday night and continues through early Friday. We can expect 2-5 inches along with a return to sub-freezing temperatures but can't promise much more than that.

Our negative news relates to the period beginning Saturday and ending Tuesday. We have two different weather systems perfectly capable of delivering snow to Vermont in this time frame and both appear to lack the necessary tools to invigorate the jet stream in spite of larger scale variables that would seem to encourage such occurrences. System 1 was a clipper that we expected would provide the delivery of some serious cold. It is now expected to do the proverbial "face plant" in Quebec. We expect minimal snow on Saturday but the anticipated surge of cold weather may never arrive leaving us literally undefended in advance of Monday's system which contains modest amounts of Pacific moisture.

The weather system in question for Monday will travel anywhere between central New England and the St Lawrence Valley. This is a critical range of possibilities but the trend has not been our friend over the last two days. The consensus as of midday Wednesday was for this system to track near the VT-Canadian border and thus keeping the mountain in the mild air on the last day of February - the leap year day. If this system takes a more southern trajectory then we can expect a modest snowfall, but as is, it is another minimal event with most of the snow falling as a light accumulation Tuesday night.

There still is potential with a storm at the end of next week though models have again run the gamut on how this might play out. The American GFS, normally unreliable this far out, has been hinting at another snow--> rain event. It has made some nice calls but both major ensemble aggregates are more encouraging. It is admittedly very difficult to be in an encouraging mood with anything put forth by the forecast models. Still, the pattern, as it looked a few days ago, still appears favorable for the next two weeks.