A mostly mild outlook remains in place but I've seen worse !

 I want to start this post on a wintry theme. First, it is wintry thanks to the snow we received Wednesday evening and a couple of beautiful Lake Champlain enhanced snow showers that were nice to enough to present themselves to the Mad River Valley Thursday morning. More generally (and secondly), the region is on the far southern periphery of a very impressive polar vortex that impacted much of central and eastern Canada with severe early December cold. The expansive area of chill never really made a serious run at the United States but it did effectively eliminate all of the warm water in the Hudson Bay, which as of December 9th is a third frozen. Take a look !  

SST Animation

Arctic Ice Coverage - NATICE 

The upcoming forecast is not especially wintry but eliminating bad feedbacks mechanisms will hopefully pay dividends down the road. In the short term, we can expect to enjoy our wintry weather through Friday and perhaps pick up a little light snow from some rapidly northeastward moving warm advection moisture. That snow exit by early afternoon and we can expect temperatures to hover around the freezing mark through Friday night. Saturday still looks to be a torch. Mad River has indicated they want to open the practice slope on Saturday and we can expect low clouds in the morning to give way to a mild and windy afternoon with rain showers moving between 1 and 3 pm. Temperatures are likely to make it well into the 50's in the valley and at least approach 50 at the MRG base so snow conditions should soften accordingly.  It won't be as mild Sunday but it won't be cold either with temperatures hovering in the 30's. Expect both sub-freezing temperatures and wind above 2500 feet. 

The central third of the country appears to be ground zero for next week's mega torch. Mild temperatures will impact Vermont as well but as I mentioned a few days ago, we will mostly remain on the fair weather, front flank of the large jet stream ridge. This means we should see decent amounts of sunshine and it also means cooler Canadian air is likely to keep interior New England closer to normal compared with areas like Minnesota or Wisconsin. Temperatures are likely to climb into the 40's across low lying areas on Monday and might get as high as 50 very late in the week. Most of our nights will be sub-freezing however and the middle part of week will feature sunshine and readings in the thirties. I expect to see a bit of rain sometime late in the week but I've seen rainier and milder thaw's than this one. I like mild weather in the spring but I find record high temperatures in December to be rather soul crushing and I don't think we see those next week. 

There are also signs in the long range that the pattern fundamentals or teleconnection indices will be improving. The jet stream at high latitudes begins to look less unblocked and the AO index appears close to zero as we approach Christmas. All this said, the pattern still favors mild weather in New England through the Winter Solstice and beyond and even if effectively neutralize the AO and partially weaken a Pacific Jet stream, it will take a little while before we can start talking about a sustained stretch of winter weather and cold. I might add that the changes in the jet stream fundamentals actually favor a rather impressive out break of cold across the western North America. I expect some of our favorite ski areas out west to perform very well during this holiday period and into early 2022. 

I did notice that the Chrome internet browser is not letting users on to the blog while other browsers are indicating it is not secure. I will look into this and hopefully we can rectify quickly.