Lots of weather news around the country in the near term led of course by the devastating fires in Southern California. A distant second would probably be the recent snowfall across the deep south. With the wind having died out somewhat across Vermont, the state and skiers in particular will enjoy a quieter stretch of wintry weather in the coming days. It won't last as potential storminess is beginning to come into view for MLK weekend followed by a widespread extreme outbreak of cold across eastern North America. We stand a reasonable chance now of recording our coldest overall month in nearly a decade across northern Vermont if some of the simulated cold for next week indeed comes to fruition.
Lets begin with the next few days which will again feature some continuous lighter snowfall, ending hopefully as some heavier snow showers Tuesday night into early Wednesday. A clipper system over the northern Great Lakes wants to play a little hopscotch on interior New England. This dance has it and its associated moisture decaying somewhat as it tries to make an approach and ultimately the system will reestablish itself in southern Nova Scotia and heavier snows are not expected for us. That said, light snow, capable of accumulating an inch or two during the ski day Monday will be followed by more snow showers on Tuesday. Like with many clipper type system, that window when winds turn more northwesterly, which is expected later in the day Tuesday, will provide MRG the opportunity for some heavier snow showers and a 3-6 inch accumulation before the ski day Wednesday. Colder temperatures are expected to return for what we hope to be a powdery Wednesday, though Monday and Tuesday's readings will be comfortable, easily reaching the 20's on the mountain both days.
Our best shot at some sunshine and decent visibility comes Wednesday though I should mention that the computer guidance is telling me it will remain cloudy so I will split the difference and say some brief intervals of sun. Clouds should prevail for Thursday and Friday and some light snow is expected to accompany those clouds occasionally. At this time accumulations late in the week appear minimal.
MLK weekend is where it all gets interesting. Smoothing all the crazy particulars, which is what the ensemble simulations do when they aggregate all the different simulations, one would expect some snow on Saturday and a few inches of accumulation and then the bitterly cold air would gradually build across the region Sunday into Monday. Temperatures on Saturday might reach 30 fall into the teens on Sunday and perhaps end the holiday period near zero. Seems easy enough, but there is a lot of potential noise in there as several different individual simulations have indicated in recent days. As cold builds across much of North America, a ridge across the southeast part of the continent will push back some and there's a reasonable chance that a more considerable storm materializes from this and impacts the northeast during the weekend before the brutal cold takes over. Expect the forecast to evolve in the coming days. The presence of the polar jet can make it very difficult to resolve detail beyond a few days.
We've had a few temporary outbreaks of chill in the past few years but the outbreak of arctic cold next week follows a few weeks of garden variety cold and is expected to hit the United States when the Great Lakes have some ice cover and much of the country has snow on the ground (parts of southern New England being the exception). Could be jumping the gun on this call, but the cold outbreak could be the worst in nearly a decade or at least rival what we saw in 2019 in terms of both coverage and intensity. 2019 was the last year we froze Lake Erie and that happened only briefly. The question for Vermont and skiers is whether the shallow, stable and extreme arctic cold, with temperatures ranging from -15 to 10 above, will overwhelm the pattern entirely and limit the snowfall or whether the southeast ridge can stay potent enough to send a storm up the coast. We could see clipper systems also though many of those head south of us in these setups. The pattern is expected to relax some after January 24th though I expect it to remain mostly cold for the duration of the month.
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