It's nice to not have to begin a blog post by talking about mild weather or rain; instead, its a nice looking cold snow now right at our doorstep. It's also remained a very straight-forward and consistent forecast over the last several days. I was getting a little nervous early yesterday when models appeared to be taking a few steps to the south but that has since reversed with a high resolution data and global models converging on a scenario Friday that paints the southern two thirds of Vermont and all of the Berkshires in a sweet spot for snow.
Details come easy with this event. Snow begins within an hour of 7 am Friday, persists through the ski day at varying intensities and tapers off close to 7 pm. A 12-hour cold snow with temperatures holding steady in the low teens throughout the day and winds blowing at a steady but not especially intense 10-20 mph clip from the northeast. With the tick back to the north that we saw with some of the global models overnight, I think we can raise the lower end of our accumulation range up to 10 inches with a top end remaining at 16". A beautiful and very welcome cold snow, and likely the third best event of the season but not epic.
A healthy dose of late February sunshine will help lift some morning sub-zero readings back into the 20's on Saturday. We can then expect more clouds on Sunday and a period of light afternoon snow capable of producing a light 1-3 inch accumulation. Sunday will be considerably more windy than Saturday with westerly winds gusting beyond 30 mph, especially at the summits. The clipper system responsible for the light snow Sunday afternoon will also usher in a temporary round of bitterly cold temperatures to finish the month. Readings will fall back below zero Monday morning only this time we will have the added impact of strong winds and daytime temperatures on the mountain are likely to stay in the single numbers and struggle into the teens in valley locations.
An expansive jet stream ridge over Alaska is likely to hold large sway on Vermont's weather during the first half of March, keeping arctic cold ever-present in eastern Canada and keeping the chances of winter weather and even a significant winter storm in play. The La Nina regime we experienced for much of February though is also not expected to completely die off but rather weaken. There are indications of a persistent cut-off in the southwestern U.S. and a weakened warm weather ridge in the southeastern United States. Though this set up favors below normal temperatures across northern New England we could still see a spring-like interlude or two and this is exactly how I expect the March 1st through 7th period to play out. Cold weather on February 28th will linger into Tuesday when some additional snow from an aged Pacific-Northwest system is possible. A storm in the later part of the week appears less likely over the past two days but colder weather will be reinforced once before we are potentially hit with one of those spring-like interludes around the time of the first full weekend of March.
As I have mentioned previously, any warm weather is likely be short-lived. Both colder weather and the possibility for more snow is favored in the aforementioned setup and I fully expect talk of more snow in the days leading up to the Ides of March (historically always a favored time frame for a storm for completely unknown reasons).
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