Tim Kelley is back for winter 24+25 with his thorough, entertaining, and exciting weather reports. Watch this space for news about incoming weather and snow.
Year 12 here.
Where does the time go!
Great to be back at Jay Peak resort for another season of wild weather.
There’s no place else I would rather be a forecaster than right here in the northern tip of Vermont.
Nobody has more special ~ Interesting & challenging ~ weather than we do.
Emphasis on challenging.
And here we go, right out of the gate.. With an upside-down storm!
Usually, the cold and snow is north of a low-pressure center. But not this time.
This one is different: the colder and snowier side, at least to begin with, is on the south side of the storm.
It's snowing in Pennsylvania and raining in Vermont (not here at Jay so much though). In this setup, the rain changing to snow line, is moving from south to north.
Yeah, that’s right, the colder air is coming in from the south! We can credit our old friend The Greenland Block for this very unusual early winter storm. Technically, it’s called the negative north Atlantic oscillation. It has to do with high-pressure over Greenland and low pressure over the Azores.
What a coincidence we had a strong Greenland block at the beginning of October.
How many of you got to partake in the best Columbus Day Week snow riding in our life?
Since that unforgettable October POW, we’ve been mostly too warm, with only small windows for snow making and little to no help from Mother Nature.
But thanks to our outstanding mountain ops team, here we are starting the season early regardless of all those warm days we’ve had since that October snow. And wouldn’t you know it?
It’s going to be snowing as the lift spins up Jet for the first time this season.
I’m not sure we can get into the complexities on how all this is evolving other than to say that after just a little bit of snow at the summit Thursday and Friday, low pressure is going to finally move east and north allowing our wind to come from the north Friday night and Saturday. That means that the snow level is going to come down the mountain to the base, just in time for Saturday. It’s not exactly a classic Jay Cloud, with the shape of the isobars and isotherms and amount of moisture and proper lapse rate. (We'll learn more about that as the season goes on.) Just suffice to say that it’s going to be wintry looking here.
There will be snow and ice on the trees. And on the ground.
How much snow?
Before we go there, just a couple of words about the rain. There’s this shadow effect when our wind is from the southeast at most levels of the atmosphere, like leading up to Saturday. Most of the moisture gets rung out over the Presidential Range in New Hampshire, and we have a lee-side dry slot. This means we’re not getting that much rain before the snow. It is kind of misty and foggy with intermittent showers.
And it’s not a major meltdown either, it's pretty chilly. So less than a half inch of rain I would say.
Then it changes to snow from the top-down Friday night.
Back to how much snow?
This is usually where I get out my calculator and try to figure out an average snowfall rate, and how many hours. Let’s do a back of the napkin calculation. I’m going to try and do it for mid mountain.
The summit will have a little more.
And the base will have a little less.. Of course. The current thinking is that the snow level comes down from the summit to the base of Jet by Saturday sunrise, then we have snow falling, at intermittent intensities, for the most part into midday Sunday.
Let’s go for an average point two ~.2 ~ inches of snow per hour, for about 30 hours.
That's about 6 inches. A dense 6 inches. Lighter and deeper up top and thinner and heavier at bottom. The temperature probably holds pretty close to 30° most of the day Saturday. 20s up top.
Wind from north 20-25 mph. As this prolonged storm lifts out Sunday afternoon, it looks like we do have a good night of dryer and fairly chilly weather to keep snow guns going for a time late Sunday into early Monday. And you’ve heard about all those storms on the West Coast. They’re going to break into pieces and come east.
Next week looks pretty exciting!
Initially, we are going to have a surge of warmer air on Monday with some mixed precipitation possible.
Not a big meltdown but maybe about 12 to 18 hours of temperatures closer to 40°. A low-pressure system is going to move right across us Monday night and then on the backside we get some more upslope snow Monday night into Tuesday. And some really nice snowmaking weather Wednesday into Thanksgiving Day. A coast to coast front next with plenty of action.
It looks like there could be a much more significant ~ colder storm ~ here before next weekend.
We’re in that kind of a weather pattern. And we’re going to be in a whole different mood by then. Really stoked.
The early call would be for more snow than anything else. Would that later week storm into next weekend. We may then have a touch of arctic air coming our way, and we will really start talking about the Jay Cloud! Usually in the first post of the season, I try to talk about how the winter looks. But this one’s already pretty long, isn’t it.
It’s tough to match what happened the last couple Novembers.
But it looks like the last week of November tries to match last year. And then as the season goes on. We’ve been in a pattern of huge cut off low pressure systems. There was one in New Mexico and Colorado two weeks ago that caused record early season snow. But if you’re on the wrong side of one of those, it can also do the same with rain.
So, the early call is for another highly emotional, for those of us that are addicted to weather, and weather forecasts, an up and down ride heading through the season into the year 2025!
And you know who will be here right at your side calling the play-by-play..
TK, at your service!
We'll be back Tuesday to begin our twice a week updates.
Usually on Tuesday and Friday.
Talk again soon.
Ride on!
-TK
