Just a beautiful cold snow Tuesday and several days of cold weather to enjoy it. Tuesday morning snowfall has been light, but a few hours of steadier snow Tuesday afternoon should get us to 3 inches with another inch falling when winds shift out of the northwest Tuesday evening, blowing in some moisture from Lake Champlain. Clouds and snow are keeping temperatures in the teens Tuesday and Wednesday's readings should be a few degrees under that with gustier west and southwest winds pushing the remains of the midwest chill in our direction. The southwest wind direction is typically a warm one for the MRV, but Wednesday is an exception since south and west has been where the cold air has been the last several days. I think we squeeze a few hours of sun out of Wednesday though clouds are expected to advance back into our area again later in the day.
Clouds are also expected for Thursday with temperatures in the high teens and just a little bit of light snow. Accumulations should be minimal and I think we are looking at about a week of very minimal amounts of new snow. Yes, we have the ingredients in place to produce a decent storm for Friday, but the polar jet is expected to suppress or confine much of this action well to our south. It will give us a chance to get some cold sunshine, especially over the upcoming weekend but I am ready to write off the Friday storm as a miss. If the Friday storm fails to come together entirely it does keep the door open for some terrain induced snow Saturday, Saturday night into early Sunday, fueled largely by the very unfrozen Lake Champlain. A big storm off the east coast can have the effect of reducing the available moisture and increasing stability in this setup, but a lesser storm would keep the door open for snow showers over us. Shallow arctic cold is limiting the depth of potential instability, but Lake Champlain is very warm providing some of the needed thermodynamics. I think we will receive at least a few hours of sunshine in either case over the weekend but it will be chilly with temperatures below zero during the morning and struggling to get into the teens during the afternoon.
The split polar vortex will have dropped its renaming available cold for the weekend and will provide a large swath of the Untied States to warm considerably next week. Vermont will experience this as well with temperatures climbing into the 20's Monday and 30's for Tuesday. I was happy to see more evidence of some resistance to this warmup across eastern Canada and it appears possible that we can escape excessive temperatures or rain next week. We could even get really lucky and squeeze out a few inches of warm advection, overrunning snow as mild air to our southwest battles it out with the weakened but prevailing cold in eastern Canada. The jet stream certainly doesn't look exciting next week at face value though I do see a potential pathway through with minimal damage.
The warm-up next week comes as a result of the dramatic loss of high latitude blocking. The Pacific continues to appear relatively cooperative with just one small blip; in fact, the Pacific appears ready to produce another round of split flow at the end of January just a ridge begins to reemerge over western North America. Certainly some reasons to be hopeful that a new period of storminess could begin around the time of January 29th even if we experience a lull in new snowfall over the next 7-10 days.
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