Tim Kelley is back for winter 25+26 with his thorough, entertaining, and exciting weather reports. Watch this space for news about incoming weather and snow.
Less cold and more snow please.
You got it. It’s a warm front.
And it has snow. Then it’s a cold front, and it has snow too.
Unlike our previous 14 Arctic fronts, this week we get the Arctic Front’s more jovial little brother, the Polar Front.
The Polar Front can snow just as hard, or harder, than an arctic front. But when it’s done snowing, we don’t have to freeze our tookuses off. The temperature stays above 0° and the wind is not blasting.
The initial burst of snow is heaviest between 4 PM Tuesday and 2 AM Wednesday. In that 10 hour period we should get at least 6 inches of snow. I’m trying to be conservative. It’s going to be higher density snow than we had with the last several Arctic fronts, so this 6 inches, maybe 10, will be a kind of leg workout we haven’t seen in some time.
Plus, lately it’s been hard to keep warm. This time it may be hard to keep cool on Wednesday morning, with temperatures way up in the 20s.
But it’s a powder day, and there’s no wind.
That’s from the warm front.
Then there’s a cold front. It’s a polar cold front, not an arctic cold front, so it’s not going to snow like crazy. It’s just going to snow regular snow. A little bit less dense than the Wednesday morning snow.
From Wednesday afternoon into Thursday morning, we get another 10 inches of snow. The only reason it’s deeper is because it is less dense. It’s about the same, or even less, water content. The wind will pick up a bit Thursday, so it’s colder, with temperatures falling back into the teens.
But it’s another powder day.
We get a brief dose of polar high pressure Thursday night and Friday. So it should stop snowing and the temperature goes back down to zero by Friday morning. It should not be that windy, and we should have leftover powder stashes and nicely refreshed soft packed powder on the groomers, with temperatures recovering pretty close to 20° in the afternoon.
What about the weekend?
Admittedly, this week has been model mayhem, as we say in the weather forecasting guidance department. It looks like the dust may be settling in our favor, but it’s still a fairly low confidence forecast, so we are cautiously optimistic. I guess that’s the best way to say it.
For a while there, we thought we might have a weekend without any action, maybe just some nice seasonable chill and high pressure. But things are changing.
At least they’re changing for the white reason.
All the guidance is now suggesting there’s some kind of wayward tropopausal polar vortex swirling in from Quebec toward the southwest this weekend.
Yeah, I know. That doesn’t happen very often, does it?
So what does that mean?
It’s just another reason to make it snow. It’s a very unstable cold pool aloft with a little bit of a surface boundary. That’ll bring in snow showers during the day Saturday.
Maybe squall isn’t the right word. Squall implies winds of 30 to 40 miles per hour or something like that. How about we call them intense snow showers, where the wind goes to 20 to 30 mph and the temperature at the base of the mountain is still well into the 20s. But it’s a very unstable air mass, colder aloft.
Simply put, more midwinter weather.
Mother Nature is sending us some more Valentine’s love in the form of another 4 inches or so of snow during the day Saturday.
I think this pattern extends through Sunday into Monday, right into Presidents’ Day. On the backside of that little upper low, there will be another attempt at a warm up, with another ripple of energy along a stalled polar front. That may keep us snowing Sunday into Monday, with another 4 or 5 inches of snow from Sunday afternoon into Monday morning.
So it looks like we’re setting up for a succession of powder day after powder day through the weekend. The least snowy day looks like Friday.
Another fun run in our history making winter of 2025-26.
Sorry I can’t be there with you this week. I have to T-Rex sit.
T-Rex is my snow dog.
We’ll be watching and listening to our friends hooting and hollering from throughout the Northeast Kingdom though.
Talk again Friday.
TK and T-Rex
