Beautiful Thanksgiving snowfall in northern Vermont was scenic and brought us a step closer to opening day. It appears Sugarbush has a tentative opening planned for December 1st but I have no inside intel aside from what the website is showing except to say that favorable snowmaking conditions will continue for the upcoming week and beyond.
The prevailing west flow encompassing both the eastern Great Lakes area and all of New England is a dry one for Vermont. The lake effect snow bands tend to ring themselves out over the Adirondacks and the moisture from Lake Champlain is typically deposited in areas from Stowe northward. The high country will remain sub-freezing atop our new found late November snow, but addional snow showers will be light through the weekend and I would extend this outlook through much of Monday. Temperatures on the mountain will stay within a 10 degree range of 15-25 and generally below 20 in summit locations through this time in spite of some limited sunshine.
I've been looking for that flow to turn more northerly and tap into some of that relative warmth from Lake Champlain and the opportunity for that, though limited, appears on the forecast maps Monday evening into Tuesday. If we can get a few inches, it would be of the very powdery and fluffy variety accompanied by temperatures in the low 20's. Those wintry readings will continue into the later part of the week when a much more impressive looking clipper system brings us our next decent show at some significant snow late Wednesday into Thursday. This storm has the capability of attaining some additional strength as it interacts with the warm coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean and this opens the door for some higher upside potential. A more significant chunk of early season arctic cold will then envelop Vermont on Friday and into the first full weekend of December. Daytime temperatures might fail to break 20 degrees either Friday, Saturday or both.
The pattern overall appears supportive of colder weather for the first half of December thanks again to favorable jet stream conditions in the Pacific. The American Ensembles shift some of this colder weather westward around December 14th/15th. By contrast the European Ensembles manage to keep some of the ridging structure alive in western North America while the weakened Pacific jet conditions are shown to at least somewhat persist. Even the possibility that the colder could persist beyond the 15th would suggest one of the best December setups in years for Vermont ski country.
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