Active pattern going forward will yield either "mixed" or very good results

The bad news would be our short term outlook which was not helped by the disappointing terrain induced event Saturday and will also not be helped by the current system which will collapse southward and will mostly avert the region. This weather event which had so much promise as it exited the rocky mountain west advertising the potential for an extended period of overrunning snow will bring only a brief period of snow to southern New England and will merely dust up central and northern Vermont with a light accumulation. This systems potential was destroyed by a potent polar jet disturbance which got involved at the wrong time and will force the storms energy to sag south. It will keep the cold weather well entrenched across the region as temperatures plummet to 10 below by Tuesday morning before recovering into the teens during the day thanks to sunshine.

The good news would be the continuous train of storms which we expect over the next week and a half or so. It is a classic La Nina set up with both cold weather and plenty of pacific energy across the western half of the nation pressing against the relative warmth of a southeast U.S. upper ridge. The arctic air is proving formidable however and has been fighting the good fight (even though it was too good of a fight in the case of the current system). The first such potential event is Friday, a weather system talked about in the last post as a storm the models failed to yield any decisive answers on. The European continuous to give the "wrong" answer by allowing the storm to track close to the St Lawrence valley thus bringing ice into the region Friday. The GFS continues to show a nice powder event for the region as it did a few days ago. The recent runs of the Euro however were a little farther south however and we would need this storm to track another 100 miles south and the results would be more fruitful.

Two additional storm systems will also garner speculation after the Friday event. The first has the possibility of delivering snow Sunday or Monday and another during the middle of the week. As mentioned Friday, a contradictory set of indicators exists with the teleconnection indices now indicating a very unfavorable blocking regime although the various ensembles show a somewhat cold scenario for mainly the northern tier of the United States. It is this clash which is likely which is the cause of the very active weather and we can only hope the snow from all these storms falls over northern Vermont.