It's admittedly more challenging to forge ahead with blogging efforts with a not so promising weather pattern staring us down in the face. Unless we get saved by the middle or later part of March, this season, which started with so much promise in November, is set to mostly fall apart on us. We certainly didn't get any help from our recent storm Thursday night, which under-performed and wasn't expected to do that much to begin with. Some incoming arctic air for the weekend will retreat northward just as quickly as it arrived and will not be accompanied by the typical round of accumulating snow showers. And then we have a torch for the middle part of next week which has some ugly characteristics I could do without (at least until later in the spring).
Even as this warm pattern gets better established over eastern North America, cold arctic air will actually be building and expanding across western North America centered over Alaska and the Yukon. These regions are setup for a bitterly cold finish to February and first half of March. Further south, ski country across the west appears promising in early March as well with storminess in the Pacific bringing moisture to both the central and southern Rocky Mountain regions as well as the Sierra Nevada. None of this bodes well for ski areas in the east however. Vermont is set up to have a chilly Saturday with temperatures on the mountain hovering in the low teens accompanied by gusty winds. Winds will shift on Sunday out of milder southwesterly direction and help modify temperatures to near 30 degrees. The later part of Saturday appears to feature some Sunshine and this is expected to carry through Sunday when conditions become more comfortable.
The fierce mild intrusion next week appears short-lived, but very damaging. I'll get to that in a bit. New snow, if we get it over the next week appears most likely Sunday night from a disturbance receding into Quebec. I am not optimistic on this feature delivering, but it will manage to delay the big influx of warmth by a day. Following a mostly cloudy and near 40-degree early spring-like day on Tuesday, stronger southerly winds will push temperatures toward 50 by Wednesday morning and near 60 in some valley areas as the day progresses. Dewpoints will climb well into the 40's and a period of rain appears to be a virtual certainty at some points. This combination of weather conditions will be damaging to snow conditions even though colder weather is expected to arrive Thursday evening. The rain doesn't appear especially heavy as of now or pose a flood risk and I can keep the door open that precipitation will change to a period of snow Wednesday night, but support for this is tepid right now.
The return of colder weather on our leap year day of February 29th represents a very small piece of the intense chill that will be mostly bottled up in western North America for the first 10 days of March. Once again, the cold weather, though intense for a day on Thursday will quickly recede and give way to more early spring-like conditions for the first full weekend in March. This is a broad well-defined pattern which will favor mild weather across New England and much of eastern Canada while cold weather is very focused on western Canada and Alaska. Every single teleconneciton indicator is expected to turn strongly unfavorable over the next week which will help bring this pattern on. By March 10th however, the teleconnection indices neutralize and in the case of NAO/AO are indicated to turn slightly favorable. I have yet to see evidence that a Sudden Stratospheric Warming event will have a material impact on how the polar vortex might impact North America. There is harder evidence however of less mild weather after the 10th and an increased potential for storminess.
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