Snowfall early New Year's Day was underwhelming and might have served as decent foundation material had we received more of it. The corridor from Randolph north to Northfield seemed to fare better, scoring closer to 4 inches of the same dense mash that Mad River Glen got. The backend moist conveyor is finally delivering fluffier snowfall as temperatures continue to cool across the entire Green Mountain Spine. Cooler temperatures have actually arrived in southern Vermont first, wrapping around the very mature cyclone now to our northeast. Snow will be enhanced by the unfrozen Lake Champlain and we should to well Thursday with temperatures in the 20's and 4-8 inches of new snow, 3-6 of which falls before the ski day and another 1-3 during. With the storm hovering over us much of New Year's Day, we managed to avoid the stronger wind gusts, but expect conditions to be very windy both Thursday and Friday with west-northwest winds gusting as higher than 50 mph at the summits. Higher resolution models do have the snowfall shifting northward Thursday night and Friday though some more sporadic snow showers should continue along with steady temperatures now mainly in the teens on the mountain and 20's in valley locations. Winds will remain strong through the weekend though not quite like Thursday, some light snowfall should be expected with a light accumulations one or both days and temperatures remaining in the teens and single numbers. Obviously wind chill temperatures will be much lower.
The forecast over the coming 10 days appears drier in the sense that models have been suppressing the impact of organized storminess to more southern areas of the eastern United States. The presence of the polar jet in January certainly has the propensity to do that. One weaker disturbance passing over the Mid-Atlantic on Friday is contributing to a less snowy outlook on January 3rd (for us) and the storm threat on January 6 also appears to be confined Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and perhaps the NYC metro and will have the impact making our outlook drier and likely sunnier early next week. All that said, the weather map appears uniquely intriguing and this is partially driven by the partially unfrozen Hudson Bay, and eastern Great Lakes. The current storm system is expected to pinwheel around eastern Canada for days and a fetch of moisture is indicated to drip southward toward northern New England next week. Hard to predict if substantial snow materializes from all this, but if it were it to happen, it's most likely during the middle of the week after the east coast storm (to our south) departs and before the approach of a late week clipper system. I might add that we can expect the wind to continue throughout much of next week thanks to this peculiar weather maps. Temperatures are likely to hover in the low teens on the mountain most of the time with the with wind and cloudiness limiting the temperature range between day and night.
Cold outlook remains in place well beyond next week and the clipper system I alluded to is likely to bring a reinforcing blast of cold to much of the eastern United States by January 11th. The low pressure spinning in eastern Canada appears caught in a giant spider web thanks to this weather pattern. As the pattern evolves and the cold continues, the negative NAO or downstream jet stream blocking is driving this and appears to be limiting storm opportunities at least in model world. One thing I can safely say is that the risk of the rogue thaw has dropped for the first 3 weeks of January and the two inches of glop New Year's morning is likely to remain in place for MLK weekend.
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