10-20 inch snow on track for much of the northern Vermont high country !

Our upcoming storm is, for the most part, on track to deliver us additional snow and leave us in really fantastic shape going into our upcoming opening weekend. We can speed up the timing of precipitation by a few hours with mixed precipitation arriving in the MRV around 1 PM and then changing to all snow by 3 PM. The snow has the potential to fall heavily for a time early this evening before subsiding for a few hours later this evening. We can categorize this entire weather situation as fairly garden variety for northern Vermont with competing low pressure centers, one trying to develop along the southern New England coastline and another tracking through the eastern Great Lakes. The initial, western low pressure area is not going to cede ground so easily and this puts a ceiling on the upside snow potential. Still, the early evening snow burst combined with another decent round of snow during the overnight hours and then additional snow showers during the day Monday is going to put the high country in that 10-20 inch total snowfall category. The snow will be wet to start, but get a bit drier during the overnight hours and temperatures on the mountain should stay in the 20's for much of Monday. It will be a different story in valley locations with mostly a wet snow falling throughout much of the event and temperatures rising into the 30's Monday afternoon. The Champlain Valley will experience a similar drill to last weekend with more rain and a minimal gloppy snowfall Sunday night. 

The rest of the upcoming week looks wintry with sub-freezing temperatures on the mountain through Friday. Again, I would like to promise additional snow showers and we have a supportive wind direction for such throughout much of the week, but action in the jet stream to our south will put a limit on that activity. We can certainly see flurries, but I like the idea of decent amounts of sunshine Tuesday to Thursday with temperatures remaining in the 20's during the days and falling into the single numbers potentially on top of all that snowcover Thursday morning. 

I was hoping we could fend off any mild instrusion for opening weekend, but this appears more challenging as of this update. The reemergence of clouds are likely to keep temperatures in check for the Friday-Saturday period but the Sunday Monday time frame looks dangerous in terms of mild temperatures and the potential for some rainfall. Still some time to change some of this, but this would be my face value assessment at the moment. 

I wasn't especially happy with the longer range trends either. We do have some colder, somewhat wintry weather returning for the December 11-14 period, but the large Greenland block which helped power the NAO deep into negative index territory, and no doubt helped produce that historic snowfall in Munich, Germany, will vanish. One of the bigger features in jet stream is colder, more unsettled weather in Alaska which will tighten the jet stream in the Pacific in a unwelcome way. If this materializes we will have challenges to deal with in the December 15-20 time frame, but this is certainly not atypical for many of our Decembers.