Most of the prevailing uncertainties with the short term outlook in the last update have gotten sorted out as of Friday. The best chance to see some sunshine this weekend will be the sunrise on Saturday. After that, clouds overtake us and ultimately the rain will overtake us. There's a 1-2 hour window right around noon on Saturday for snow or a snow/sleet conglomeration. If we get lucky and precipitation falls hard enough in that time frame, we will see a small accumulation during the ski day. By then end of the ski day however, precipitation will be falling as a cold rain with a few isolated pockets of freezing rain. A third to a half inch of mostly rain is expected from all this, most of it falling Saturday evening and none of it falling during the day Sunday, though clouds are expected to linger most of that day with temperatures gradually rising into the middle 40'.
The next uncertainty relates to early next week,specifically the Monday to Wednesday time frame. This is just another victory for the mild air. The low level push of cold the Euro was teasing us with a few days ago has vanished and it looks like a torch. According to the American model, low clouds burn away Monday and Tuesday and temperatures will be in the 50's on much of the mountain and near 60 in valley areas. The Euro has been resistant in the elimination of these clouds and in fact has some rainfall reentering the weather picture on Tuesday. This would keep temperatures down slightly but it will be mild regardless and corn horns will be sounding at all elevations of the Vermont ski country.
We start moving into more model disagreement with the Wednesday outlook. I am of the opinion we see drier and cooler weather this day with temperatures generally holding in the 40's along with a few breaks of sunshine. The period Thursday through the 2nd full weekend of March looks very cloudy with several areas of precipitation potentially impacting Vermont. Could the low level push of cold air Wednesday be strong enough to set up a period of snowfall for Thursday or Friday (March 7th/8th) ? It's not impossible according to some data. For the 2nd full weekend of March, there are stronger indications that a more significant storm system takes shape. There's not a lot of cold air support with arctic air bottled up well to our north, but sometimes a strong low pressure area in March is enough to make the magic happen, at least with some help from elevation. In the wake of this feature will come a few days of cooler weather (March 12th-15th) though I still don't see an extended stretch of sub-freezing temperatures
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