Bitterly cold Friday/Saturday and huge storm potential for early next week

 The overunning snow Tuesday night was a little disappointing but our run of winter weather continues and will continue in the MRV at least for the next week.  There's much to unpack in this update including the coldest weather of the season so far and the big storm potential for next week. Meanwhile, we should see some stiff winds on Thursday along with some snow flurries but temperatures will hover in the teens on the mountain making it the warmest of the next 4 days. 

We haven't had much bitterly cold arctic air this season. Much of that resulting from the persistent jet stream blocking over the Davis Strait/Labrador Sea/Hudson Strait area. A "mini-me" polar vortex will squeeze its way underneath that feature late Thursday into Friday and bring the wind and bitterly cold temperatures to New England; in fact, Vermont will be pretty close to ground zero with the intensity of the chill. Temperatures on the mountain will hover within a few degrees of zero Friday with 20-40 mph winds producing dangerous wind chills. Saturday's temperatures will be similar but the wind won't be quite as strong. Sunday will feel a lot nicer with temperatures recovering into the teens and calm winds. 

Thinking back on my years following weather, which spans over a generation now, I can't think of a much better set up for an east coast storm than the one early next week. The "mini me" PV will supply the cold early in the weekend but the polar jet will retreat quickly leaving a modifying arctic air mass over New England late on Sunday into early Monday. Meanwhile a strengthening storm system will progress east from the central plains Saturday and ultimately begin to consolidate energy near the North Carolina coast later Sunday. Now here is where the fun begins. There is no polar jet to speed this thing along or drive it offshore; instead, this storm will tunnel underneath the blocking in northern Quebec allowing for what could be fireworks display along the east coast that could last days. Now many of the medium range models over the past two days are keeping the storm south of Vermont, but how many times have we seen this movie. To put it simply, if you account for some of the inherent biases in the models 5-6 days out, we are in a pretty spot right now. Looking at the recent run of the Euro from Wednesday afternoon, I started to feel like it was late February 1969 - a period I did not live through in Vermont but wish I did. So lets stay positive and watch this sucker over the next few days, knowing that it could miss us but also knowing that this is the type of storm capable of producing 2-4 feet of snow in a particular location. I am actually pretty sure it will do that somewhere, but very uncertain as to the location. 

Temperatures are expected to modify even as the continues to rage and the risk of a thaw continues late next week. If anything, that risk appears to have lessened somewhat and there appears to be at least a chance we can find a way through to the weekend of February 6th and 7th unscathed. Starting to think of this winter as the tall man stalemate in tennis. You know, when neither player can break the others 1000 mph serve and the match goes on and on and on. In this case its the Pacific Ocean jet stream and the high latitude blocking going at it. The latter has looked more formidable over the past few days and has helped to neutralize a longer range outlook that appeared to be moving in a milder direction about 4-5 days ago. Whatever the analogy, I'll take it so long as the results are good.