Big New Year's holiday surprise looks less likely, but first half of January continues to look promising l

 Keeping score at home, I have Wednesday, December 27th as the 5th consecutive day of overcast conditions. It's an ugly stretch for many reasons and the clouds are largely going to be with us through the New Year's holiday with just a chance for a few breaks in the overcast on Sunday (New Year's eve) and Monday (New Year's day). Lets just hope we are prepaying our cloudy tax now, in advance of the solar eclipse in April. More importantly, we've also been paying the warm/rain tax on another holiday. The intermittent rain along with the poor visibility will continue through Friday. I hoped we could bring snow summit areas as soon as the 29th, but the persistent warmth in the lowest several thousand feet of the atmosphere promises to be with us until Friday evening, when at that point it is expected to get erased allowing for the potential of some light snow at the highest elevations first, and then at base areas later in the evening. 

So can we manufacture a New Year's holiday surprise ? Doesn't appear as it if will happen unfortunately. We will be cold enough for snow on Saturday and we should receive at least some light snow throughout the day with a couple inches accumulation possible. Unless we can get some more robust development of this dragging low pressure area, it will be tougher to generate a) the heavier snowfall and b) the sub 30-degree temperatures we would need for the powdery snow at the higher elevations. The door remains open for a holiday miracle and storms that require phase such as this one can always surprise. 

I hope we can begin an extended stretch of sub-freezing temperatures to the northern Vermont mountains beginning on Sunday. A clipper type system dives southeast that day and is expected to mostly disperse but it will bring clouds, some snow showers to go along with that chance of a few breaks in the overcast. New Year's day has a better chance for a few sunny breaks and should at least feature improved visibility with temperatures remaining in the 20's on the mountain. 

The split flow being indicated for the end of next week would win a beauty contest in my geeky world. It looks magnificent, but we still need to execute as to creating a storm out of all this. We also have to bring more cold air into the picture and although we begin flooding the North American continent with polar air, this is a process that needs time to play out. Most of the air over Vermont next week is more Pacific in origin and will allow 2024 to start on the above side of normal though it should remain mostly below freezing on the mountain (not so in valley areas). Still watching for something in that January 4th-6th time frame since that is when that aforementioned split flow could result in a big east coast jet amplification and storm. Coastal areas will need more cold for a big accumulation, but Vermont appears cold enough for a sizeable snow but we need a storm to make all that happen. 

The longer range has strong support from the NAO which is appears poised to make a decisive push into negative territory and more tepid support from the AO which should continue to allow arctic cold to push southward over North America. The NAO becomes a bigger ally when it comes to storminess by doing two key things. 1) Becoming an active participant in the Inland Runner Prevention Program (IRPP and also my poor attempt at humor) and 2) Allowing east coast storminess to linger in the maritimes allowing for extended periods of snow for the interior New England mountains. I have always been an skeptic that a -NAO correlates well to east coast cold (AO, PNA and EPO are better IMO), but Vermont doesn't need that as much in January. Speaking of the EPO and the Pacific more generally is where I am less enthused. We can tolerate what is being currently indicated in the aggregation of ensemble guidance but the feistier Pacific that is indicated after January 6th does favor the best action over the Rocky Mountains. Taken together though, the first half of January looks pretty good for most of ski country throughout North America and I remain optimistic.