Very typical early spring weather for the next week in northern VT but early April looks stormy

The snow this past Monday night was magnificent. One of those unique cases where northern Vermont performed exceptionally well in spite of a storm track well south of Long Island. The dry airmass was displaced rather easily allowing moisture to stream in off the Atlantic Ocean rather efficiently. Areas to our south that should have performed better under-performed or changed to rain while some areas across the northern half of Vermont received over a foot.


And with the midweek storm passing well to our south, sunshine made a multi-day appearance and allowed temperatures to climb well into the 40's Wednesday and close to 50 on Thursday and  Friday. The milder weather felt nice Thursday but it pales in comparison to what occurred in Oklahoma with temperatures reaching 90 and even 100 degrees in a few places. It has been a very warm winter across much of the south and an even warmer, at times summer-like month of March.


Just as we begin to see April on the immediate horizon, the pattern looks stormy and also capable of producing more snow. More on that in a bit. In the meantime, our weekend got split in half. The first half Saturday is sensational. Following a chilly near 20-degree start, a full day of sunshine should boost readings toward or above 50 and with very little wind. Sunday is a disaster with rain arriving by mid-morning and continuing well into the evening. The rain will hold temperatures near 40 but it won't be cold enough either at the surface or aloft to support snow during the day. At best, we could experience a bit of freezing rain in spots similar to what we saw back on March 13th. Temperatures aloft are expected to cool Sunday night and allow for some snow across much of the northern Vermont high country. This once powerful weather system over the upper Midwest will become occluded well before impacting Vermont, but with all occlusions, even the rainy ones, there's always a cool pool and that could provide a gloppy inch of snow to valley areas and a few inches above 2000 feet by Monday morning.

The aforementioned storm system will only slowly move away in the early part of the upcoming week. This will allow clouds to linger and likely keep temperatures from moving past the 50-degree mark. Current data suggests that this will improve as we get to Wednesday with a couple of mild days possible on April 1st and 2nd. This notion is predicated on another mid-week storm dodging interior New England much like this past Wednesday. A few days ago there were hints of a fairly big Vermont impact from this but not so much as of Friday March 27th. Worth watching this storm however for another possible change.

I'll never forget how insulted snow-lovers in Albany were in the winter of 2015-16. They got shut out of everything all winter and recorded most of their snow during the first week of April if I am not mistaken. Given their nearly 60 inch snow climatology, that was a snow hole for the ages. Northern Vermont actually put up a rather good fight this winter from a snowfall perspective but have been repeatedly plagued by an adverse set of teleconnection indices (AO/EPO) all winter. Much like that 2016 spring, our early April is looking rather stormy and quite volatile on the temperature scale. The AO appears to be as neutral as ever and the jet stream in the Pacific looks as relaxed as it's been all winter. I still think much of the most intense cold will remain bottled up near the Arctic given the lack of a strong high latitude blocking mechanism but the pattern does support the notion of some big east coast storms and at least a day or two of much below normal temperatures (In early April that's 30-35 for max temps).

In the 15 or so years doing the blog, the big 2-foot April snowstorm has somehow eluded us which I find somewhat remarkable in the context of that time span. No, I haven't published any research papers on it but I would imagine the return period for such an occurrence is more than once over a 10 year period (at least for the high country). Should we get something like that, would we consider it a slap in the face at this point ?