Sleet and some snow follows the thaw early Saturday but it looks much more interesting during the middle of next week

Given the approaching Martin Luther King holiday and some potential snow on that holiday, thought it would be a good time for a supplemental update. The thaw is smacking us around pretty good and nearly an inch of rain, 50-degree temperatures and wind will do some serious damage to the snow pack by Friday night. Most of the rain will fall in the midday hours Friday and it will come fast enough to cause some miner flooding given the still frozen ground and the melting snow. A return to sub-freezing temperatures comes very dramatically after about 8 PM Friday. Any rain will likely become freezing rain before midnight and then become sleet after midnight. The incoming cold is undercutting the lingering warmth associated with this storm allowing precipitation to continue well beyond the passage of the front. It also means it will take some extra time to turn that precipitation to snow. We've got some good news in that the 2nd wave of low pressure, associated with this storm will track further southeast and this gives us a longer opportunity for snow following a period of sleet early Saturday morning, but as of now, it doesn't look like a huge accumulation - about 2 - 5 inches on top of a layer of sleet. Temperatures will be back in the teens by Saturday and back below zero by Sunday and Monday mornings. Afternoon readings Sunday and Monday should be about 10 degrees and lower than that at the summits This initial shot of cold looks rather stable unfortunately so we should see lots of sunshine and little in the way of new snow after what falls Saturday.

The setup for the middle part of the upcoming week looks wildly interesting. A very potent jet stream impulse will rotate through the Great Lakes Monday and advance to the eastern seaboard Tuesday setting the stage for a highly dynamic situation. The weather feature will bring some cold weather as it drops southeastward out of Canada, but in this instance, there isn't a polar vortex or a strong separate polar jet to disrupt storm development along the eastern seaboard. The jet may in fact close off close to the Atlantic Coast before lifting northeastward late in the week. Not only is this conducive for a storm, it's also conducive for a slow moving storm. In addition, we should see a healthy pool of highly unstable air once the storm passes unlike the shallow, very stable cold that has held down snow totals in Vermont during the recent cold wave. Now there are numerous ways we could whiff. The storm might not materialize or it might form too far south and stay south.  The pool of instability I am so giddy about might also fail to deliver as they often do. At the very least however, we should keep an eye on the weather happenings between Tuesday and Thursday of next week. The mild weather is pulverizing for the time being but we could make a very quick recovery.