A marginal and somewhat mild pattern is still, and probably will produce at least some decent results for northern Vermont late next week

The combination of very fast zonal flow in the Pacific and a very unblocked jet stream in the Arctic has certainly been the main contributor to the very warm January we are currently finishing in Vermont. The impacts of this have been much, much farther reaching than just Vermont. Most of the continents of both North America and a large part of mid-latitude Eurasia have been warm. You can include pretty much all of northern Africa in that category as well.

Vermont has seen worse winter months and certainly worse January's from the standpoint of snow. Even the polar vortex winter of 2013-2014 can accurately be described as having a worse January from a snow perspective. February and March 2014 saw a big turnaround that year but storms managed to completely miss the state for the month of January and we were even hit with a very isolated thaw  that managed to miss other parts of the country.

Many of those same other parts of the country have had a glaring lack of winter weather this year. Vermont has actually managed to hold up ok in a relative sense, and its starting to look like that trend will continue. El Torchy is poised to deliver a strong dose of very mild air early next week and most of that will actually miss northern Vermont. Though we are not expecting any big snow for the weekend, flurries will accompany sub-freezing temperatures on Saturday followed by a Sunday; which, for the most part will feature similar temperatures and just cloudy skies (and little wind). We can expect a bit of snow on Sunday night and its not entirely insignificant. The snow will stem from the push of milder Pacific air into the region and the northern part of Vermont should be able to score a 2-4 inch event by Monday morning. Monday still appears to be the mild day in the immediate forecast picture but not nearly as mild as areas a couple hundred miles to our south. Temperatures will climb past the freezing mark in the low lying areas but will struggle to do so across the high country.

The outlook then gets very interesting as the week continues to progress. Its a tale of the classic New England airmass clash. Cold air from eastern Canada will be building and trying to push south while a ridge in the jet stream over the southeastern United States continues to push back. The result is a very active several days of weather and multiple precipitation producing storms. Do we have the latitude necessary to keep the precipitation snow and keep the freezing rain and rain away ? Probably not entirely but we appear to be mostly on the right side of this set up. Models continue to sort through the details and some additional changes are likely but the first flatter wave around the Wednesday time frame will likely bring some snow followed by a stronger more amplified system in the Thursday/Friday time frame that could bring the bigger variety of precipitation types, including more snow. Some powdery periods are possible in this time frame and as the details start to become more clear, the blog will try to pinpoint where those are.

Colder weather is expected for the weekend of February 8th and 9th and we can hope that the storm late next week will end as snow. After that it will be more of the same through the middle of the month. A strong area of cold centered over interior eastern Canada will battle it out with a general area of mild weather centered over the southeastern United States. The risk of a thaw is undeniable but this set up is entirely capable of producing more at least somewhat good results for northern New England and really northern New England alone. Areas farther south will continue to see very mild conditions.