Thursday, November 27^th, 2008

Summary: 0.2” new snow in Waterbury

There’s not much going on in terms of weather right now in Vermont, but here’s a quick update on some of the valley conditions I’ve seen in the past 24 hours.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the mountains yesterday when I was in Burlington, as they were hidden at the start of the day and the weather on the UVM campus was rather benign. Later in the afternoon when I was heading back to Waterbury, I had dozed off on the bus leaving Burlington, but woke up in Williston to a nice sight – it was snowing in the mountains. It didn’t look like anything too heavy, but there was an obvious demarcation line of snow in the air a bit past the initial foothills. Starting at around Richmond, and continuing through to Waterbury, there were flurries and occasionally light snow floating down. Those flurries continued through the evening, although when I went to bed there was nothing new on the snowboard. Our temperatures were in the 34 F range, so it seemed like it would have been difficult to accumulate anything with such light snowfall.

I didn’t expect to find any snow on the snowboard this morning, but there were a couple tenths of snow and graupel so I recorded some observations

Thursday, November 27^th, 2008: 8:00 A.M. update from Waterbury, VT

New Snow: 0.2 inches

Liquid Equivalent: N.D.

Snow/Water Ratio: N.D.

Snow Density: N.D.

Temperature: 34.0 F

Humidity: 98%

Dew Point: 33.3 F

Barometer: 29.97 in. Hg

Wind: Calm

Sky: Mostly Cloudy/Flurries

Event snow total: 0.2 inches

Event liquid equivalent total: N.D.

Current snow at the stake: 2 inches

Season snowfall total: 18.9 inches

The snow at our back yard stake was at 2 inches this morning, and it seems to be slowly decreasing as we’ve been having fairly seasonable high temperatures above the freezing mark in the lower valleys. I noticed that Stowe reported a new inch of snow in the past 24 hours, but accumulations seemed to be fairly minimal from this event, even for the mountains. From Justin’s MRG report, it sounds like conditions are rather hard off piste right now, but the base in Northern Vermont appears to be quite substantial and primed for the next dump.

We headed down to Southern New England for the holiday this morning, so I got to see the general state of the snowpack along the I-89 route. The Waterbury/Montpelier area seemed to have a couple of inches of snow on the ground, consistent with what we’ve got at the house. After Montpelier, as we crossed through the Green Mountains and stayed up in the higher elevations (>1,000’) the snowpack was noticeably deeper (3-4 inches) and coverage was quite consistent. As soon as we dropped back down in the Bethel area near the White River, the snowpack tapered back to an inconsistent inch or two, and within about 10 miles the snow was entirely gone save for an occasional strip along the edge of the highway left over from the plows. There was no snow down in the Connecticut River Valley, but as we rose back up in elevation, we got back into an inch or two around the Whaleback Ski Area. The Trails of Whaleback had a couple of inches of natural snow, and only looked suitable for junkboarding. Within another 10 minutes of travel all the snow had disappeared and that was essentially the last we saw of it as we headed south save for a few plow strips in New Hampshire.

J.Spin