Our friends up in King Salmon, AK, one of my favorite names for a town, just finished the month of November with temperatures averaging 21 degrees below normal. King Salmon is not especially inland, sitting not far from the Kvichak Bay adjacent to the Bering Sea and just east of the Katmai National Park. In other words, this is pretty far south in Alaska and highlights what has been a month of incredible cold along the southern coastline of our nation's largest state. Much of this cold remains as of this post and has expanded to include much of northern Canada. It will remain locked in place for the foreseeable future and will make occasional appearances in Vermont but a bit more infrequent than I would like, especially after December 9th.
Up until this aforementioned date, we do have some winter to discuss. The dynamic looking BC bomber system is unfortunately a flop. With the track of this storm now expected to be well over Quebec, the storm and its relative strength will help push above-freezing temperatures into most of the low lying areas of Vermont Thursday and any precipitation will be of the mixed or rainy variety. Above 2000 feet, rain showers Thursday afternoon will likely turn to snow by the evening. Flurries and snow showers are likely to continue into early Friday as colder air settles into the state. The mountains can expect a small accumulation from all this but I had hoped for more and I wouldn't bet on more at this point. I am more encouraged by another weaker disturbance expected to bring limited moisture to Vermont early Saturday. This arrives during a period of much colder temperatures and has the potential to provide our local high country with a few fluffy inches. Still a little difficult to say which part of Vermont will score the most from this moisture-starved system but we have as good of a shot at as anyone else of scoring a few inches. As I mentioned this disturbance comes during a decent multi-day stretch of sub-freezing cold which will begin with temperatures in the 20's Friday and continue through the weekend with single digit temperatures possible Sunday morning. Sunday looks like a December bluebird special, always appreciated by me during our darkest month of the year.
I wish I had more conclusive and better info to report for early next week. The American GFS model has in the past and continues to show an inland Great Lakes runner, so much so in the last few runs that Vermont would get a full blown torch Monday and we would just forget about snow. Other data still points to a colder more wintry scenario but even this would be well short of ideal. Consensus has certainly moved away from the possibility of a storm tracking south of us and this makes the notion of heftier accumulations a very tough ask. My guess right now would be for a snow to wintry-mix conglomeration and we could get front-end thumped with a few inches. I am trying to avoid getting sucked into to any wishcasting vortex here and remind anyone that these lousy feedbacks (warm aggregate bodies of water around us) are not going to do us any favors during these close call situations. Some good news ? We do have a second chance during the middle of the week with models starting to signal at a more organized storm coming on the heels of a short-lived but somewhat intense shot of arctic chill Tuesday and Tuesday night.
The longer range continues to look the same and not especially encouraging. Were it January or February, I could muster up some optimism that clashing of very cold air in Canada and mild air in the southeast US would serve us well. Combine the aforementioned adverse feedbacks with a decidedly +AO/EPO and tough sledding is clearly the most likely result. Any sustained stretch of milder air does appear delayed until at least the very end of next week (December 10) which would be a positive. The other positive continues to be the relative proximity of the very cold air in Canada. Much of the eastern United States is likely to avoid it but we are Vermont and are special in this regard so might get a little. To summarize though, I do not expect the period between December 10th and December 21st to be especially wintry or snowy and we should at least one very significant thaw. It will however be cold in the Pacific Northwest and snowy parts of the Rocky Mountain west. I would expect a few snowy headlines in some unusual locations as well.
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