J.Spin

That’s very cool, thanks for the update Ginx. It made me check out my most recent CoCoRaHS email, which has this: Big News – The Long-Awaited CoCoRaHS Interactive Mapping System -- Coming on August 1 Some of you have been helping test our new interactive maps and have provided great help and suggestions. We will continue to make improvements after the release, but we are as ready as we can be to finally share it with everyone. I'll spill some of the beans here and tell you that one feature of the new map will allow you to view accumulated data for a custom period of your choosing. It's really neat to view totals on a map showing the last week, or month, but we did have to place limits on how much data could be compiled at once. We’ve found and fixed most bugs – and it works well when a few dozen people are generating their favorite maps. The big question is will it bog down when 10,000 of us are enjoying these new maps at the same time. We will find that out real soon, but we've definitely made sure that data entry won't be affected if the map is overwhelmed. So keep your fingers crossed, and keep your eyes peeled for the new map on August 1st.

Yeah, July certainly didn’t get it done, but maybe August will provide some redemption with more NNE-esque temperatures and dew points. The winter was actually close to the mark on the front end, with the continuous snowpack starting on November 8th down here in the valley. The back end was a little off the mark with the snowpack disappearing on April 6th, which is a week or two early, but we had the wintry weather holding on until about mid-May. I guess that later April/May period wouldn’t really qualify as “deep winter”, but it certainly helped extend the wintry feel.

Earlier I had posted my summary table of snow stats for our site updated with the data for the 2019-2020 winter season, but I’ve had time to enter many of the other snow stats I follow, so I’ve got those listed below. I’ve highlighted in green any record values that were added to the data set this season, with a notable one being our earliest ever start of the continuous winter snowpack here on November 8th. The 7.1” storm that began on November 7th created a number of firsts in the snowfall department. Although we get some accumulating October storms almost every year at our site, we’ve really never had a large one (or even one greater than 2 inches) down at this elevation in the time we’ve lived here, so those earlier storm records were ripe for the picking. The final value of note was at the other end of the season, where we had the snowiest May in our records. Total season snowfall: 142.1” Season snowfall rank: 11th out of 14 October snowfall: 0.0” November snowfall: 17.8” December snowfall: 30.0” January snowfall: 34.4” February snowfall: 37.2” March snowfall: 12.9” April snowfall: 4.1” May snowfall: 5.7” (HIGHEST) First frozen precipitation: Nov 3rd First accumulating snowfall: Nov 3rd First ≥1" snowfall: Nov 8th First ≥2" snowfall: Nov 8th (EARLIEST) First ≥3" snowfall: Nov 8th (EARLIEST) First ≥4" snowfall: Nov 8th (EARLIEST) First ≥6" snowfall: Nov 8th (EARLIEST) First ≥8" snowfall: Dec 7th First ≥10" snowfall: Jan 16th First ≥12" snowfall: Feb 7th Largest snowstorm: 17.0” Starting date of largest snowstorm: Feb 6th Number of storms: 55 Number of ≥1” storms: 31 Number of ≥2” storms: 20 Number of ≥3” storms: 15 Number of ≥4” storms: 13 Number of ≥6” storms: 7 Number of ≥8” storms: 5 Number of ≥10” storms: 3 Number of ≥12” storms: 1 Number of ≥15” storms: 1 Number of ≥18” storms: 0 Number of ≥20” storms: 0 Number of ≥24” storms: 0 Average inches of snowfall per storm: 2.6 Days with trace snowfall or greater: 107 Total L.E. during accumulating snowfall season: 24.34” Snow/Sleet L.E. during accumulating snowfall season: 10.89” Total Snow/Total Water (Snow/Water Ratio): 5.84 Average water content of all precipitation: 17.1% Total Snow/Snow+Sleet L.E. (Snow/Water Ratio): 13.05 Average water content of snow/sleet: 7.7% Latest accumulating snowfall: May 12th Latest frozen precipitation: May 12th Days in yard snowfall season: 191 Start of continuous snowpack: Nov 8th (EARLIEST) Days with >0" snowpack: 158 Days with ≥1" snowpack: 129 Days with ≥6" snowpack: 64 Days with ≥12" snowpack: 24 Days with ≥24" snowpack: 0 Days with ≥36" snowpack: 0 Max snow depth: 21.0” Date of max snow depth: Feb 8th Snow depth days: 914.0 Last day of continuous snow at stake: Mar 18th Last day of continuous snow in yard: Apr 6th Days with continuous snow at stake: 132 Days with continuous snow in yard: 151

I’ve never quite understood that either – beyond adulthood, shouldn’t the body be less able to handle environmental extremes as one advances in age? My parents are older than you, and they purposefully don’t stay down in Florida during the summer - unless you’re constantly in the water or A/C, the combination of heat and humidity down there is really tough on the body. The uncomfortable feeling that people get as heat index values rise is the body indicating that the conditions are not optimal, and the NWS literally issues heat advisories because of the potential effects of elevated heat index values.

Yeah, it would really be easy to get by with just a dehumidifier around here in the mountains where summer temperatures aren’t typically outrageous. Just take that humidity down to the 50% range like you say, and the air is totally comfortable. The first few years that we lived in this house I didn’t have a dehumidifier in the basement, and then my parents were getting rid of an old one they had, so I started using it to keep that basement humidity down in the summer. It was only then that I really noticed how important it is to have that dehumidification in the basement during the humid months to minimize corrosion on metal parts. Even though it wasn’t necessarily excessive yet, all those cold water pipes, valves, and other equipment that sweat when the moisture levels rise will really take on a lot more tarnish and corrosion if you don’t regulate the humidity. Dehumidifying also basically wipes out any of that musty basement odor, so there’s so much that’s positive with respect to keeping things dry down there that I’d never go back. Thankfully, it only seems like we need it about three months of the year or so – during the rest of the year the humidity level is low enough on its own that the dehumidifier doesn’t run. We don’t have any sort of sump in the basement, so for the first season or two we were just emptying the dehumidifier collection bucket when it filled. Then at some point my dad pointed out that we could just use the condensate pump on our furnace to empty it out automatically (these pumps typically have extra input holes for this sort of thing), and that has been amazing. We don’t really have to think about it now, and it just runs automatically – until it dies of course. Dehumidifiers only seem to last so long before something goes, and this spring I had to do a couple weeks of troubleshooting before I finally diagnosed that our unit was low on refrigerant. Thankfully Frigidaire has a five-year warranty on that issue so they just sent us a new one. We would have bought a new one if we had to though – this has definitely not been the summer to go without a dehumidifier down there.

Oh, I saw you talk about those overnight lows in one of the discussions, but I figured the nighttime temperatures around 80 F were just a Champlain Valley thing! We must have either been protected/decoupled here, or the temperature spike was so brief before the rains came that I slept right through it. The temperatures had dropped to near 70 F when I was heading to bed, and I figured we were pretty safe. I think the temperature was a couple degrees higher when I got up, but it wasn’t too early and I figured it was just the day starting to warm. No question about that though, if I’d seen temperatures up near 80 F during the overnight that would easily seal the deal on using the A/C.

Oh, I totally forgot about sun exposure, so that’s a very good point you bring up. We’ve got good protection from large trees all around (same thing that minimizes drifting for snow measurement here), and certainly to the south, so we really don’t get hit hard with sun to warm the house. Combine that with the other stuff I mentioned in the response to PF, and you can see how it’s relatively easy to keep things cool. I guess a testament to that effect would be that we’ve never even considered running the A/C during the day because the house pretty much stays cool enough on its own – we would just turn it on to cool for sleeping if we couldn’t cool with fans. It can certainly get tough if you have lots of sun exposure though. We had a place in Montana that had these massive windows that faced directly south with nothing to block the sun. The unobstructed views of the Bitterroot Valley, the Bitterroot River, and the Bitterroot Range were fantastic: …but, we certainly paid for it in the heart of summer because that south side of the house would bake. And of course clouds were often pretty sparse in that drier climate, so you didn’t get much help there. Thankfully, most nights cooled down into the 50s or even 40s F with the dry air, so nighttime cooling wasn’t an issue. Indeed, the need for A/C does depend somewhat on how low your temperatures get at night. We still dropped to around 70 F these past couple of nights here at our place to enable overnight cooling. If temperatures are staying well up into the 70s F overnight though, there’s not much you can do. Ambient cooling isn’t going to cut it and you have to call on the A/C.

We did use A/C during that 2018 hot spell where temperatures got up near 100 F, but the key thing for us is really the overnights – if we can’t cool the house down with just fans then we’ll fire up the A/C. There must have been something about that 2018 spell (either number of days or forecast overnight lows) that sealed the deal in that we knew we wouldn’t be able to keep the house cool. Our house is a fairly new build and has fantastic insulation, so what we do on most warm days where it’s going to be up near 90 F or above is continue cooling all night and into the morning with the window fans until the outdoor temperature hits the indoor temperature. Then we lock down the house to keep he cold air in. All the windows are closed, and we have double cell cellular shades on all the windows/doors. We keep everything closed for the day until the outdoor temperature drops below the indoor temperature, then we open things up and start the cooling again. It’s not fun having to keep the windows closed during the day, but we’d have to do that if we were running the A/C anyway. The effects are pretty amazing though, and the temperature differential between indoors and out can be quite dramatic. We’ve even had people visit and ask if we had the A/C on because of how cool the house was relative to outside. We do have a dehumidifier that is set for 50-55% humidity in the basement, so one could always retreat there if the humidity gets too annoying. We’re pretty lucky as you know out here in the mountain valleys in that we typically decouple quite well, so that makes the natural cooling much more practical. There is a limit to the cooling you can do naturally though, and if temperatures are only getting down to around 70 F for multiple nights in a row, it gets harder to really get a good cooling session in during the night. During this most recent stretch, it was really just two nights, so it was certainly workable, but we would have gone A/C if that was going to continue for another couple of nights. July is really the only month in which an extended stretch like that seems to occur around here, so once we get to August you’d really need some sort of record-smashing episode for that to happen.

We picked up 0.03” of liquid from that frontal passage, but dew points should be dropping substantially behind it. These past couple of days probably made for the most humid stretch of the summer up to this point around here – there were definitely thoughts of going with A/C for these past couple of nights, but thankfully we were able to cool things down decently with fans. July is our most (some would say only) summery month in this area, and it certainly did its job this year as it often does. If it’s coming in with record numbers this year, it certainly felt as if it was on the top end humidity side for at least a couple of periods. The forecast looks fine for the rest of the month though, and even beyond into August, and we’re getting well past the climatological peak of heat here (~July 17th) so hopefully this most recent humidity episode will represent the peak in that arena. We’re typically safe from a stretch like that here in the mountains once we get to August from what I’ve seen – we can definitely get some hot days, but they’re more like warm June days and typically can’t match the potency of July’s combination of heat and humidity. The most extreme episodes we get from August onward on are typically shorter and seem to be due to events like a tropical storm really punching that type of air this far north. It’s crazy to look at our weather here now and think that heat indices in the 100 F range are still the topic of conversation in SNE. We’re certainly on different sides of a front now.

On the topic of our July rainfall around here, I tried out one of those cool plots I’ve been seeing in our subforum from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. I plotted rainfall for here in VT up through yesterday, and I was somewhat encouraged by the result for this area. Our site is in that region of black shading that covers this portion of the Northern Greens, and although that color is off scale, it would at least jive with the 5.10” of liquid we’ve had this month. I was a bit less excited when I tried out some other plots though. It has us shaded for something in the range of 1.20” – 2.00” for June rainfall, when we actually had 4.27” for the month. I also tried out snowfall for this past season, and it put us in the 84” – 101” range, when I recorded >140” during the period. It even has the Mt. Mansfield area in the next tier down for snowfall (67” – 84”) during that period so it’s clear that there are issues. Exporting the input numbers gave me some insight into what might be part of the issue – there were only 22 stations used, and they look like co-op stations, so I’m guessing no CoCoRaHS data. I’m not sure if there’s a way to include more station data, because that would obviously help improve the plots with the vast array of mountain microclimates we’ve got around here. The BTV NWS plots of this sort seem to include those data, or certainly at least some of it, and bringing in CoCoRaHS info offers the chance for 80+ additional VT stations that could really fine tune the plots to catch some of the microclimates. It’s obviously a nice tool regardless, but if anybody knows how to infuse more data points, certainly pass that along.

We were similar here with 0.67” this morning after a bit of earlier rain during the overnight. This latest round of rain pushed our site past 5” for the month, and past the July average here, so with some of the month left, maybe we’ll make up some ground from June being a bit low.

The lower moisture air mass and relatively clear skies set things up for some fantastic celestial viewing last night – once it actually got dark enough. Even though we’re a month past the solstice, the evening light seemed to take forever to dissipate – it was well past 10:00 P.M. before comet viewing really took off. Once that light fades though, NEOWISE simply explodes out of the night sky and is blatantly obvious with the naked eye around here. I’ve always been very impressed with how dark the skies are in our area, and I think it’s due to the fact that we’re way down in the Winooski Valley, and light from Burlington, and even Waterbury, is blocked by the surrounding mountains. The mountains obviously make it tough to get views on the horizon, but NEOWISE is high enough in the sky that it’s not an issue. A guy I spoke with last night said 10:30 P.M. is pretty optimal for viewing NEOWISE. After chatting with a colleague at work yesterday who had been getting pictures earlier this week, I shot 4-second images at F/4, ISO 16,000, with a focal length of 80-100 mm on APS-C. That focal length seems decent to catch a good sense of the tail and some surrounding stars. I just took a few quick shots and didn’t have time to really nail any images at the level of focus I’d like to get, but I’m happy with that exposure level, so hopefully I can try later this week when the skies are supposed to clear up again. Indeed as Tamarack noted, NEOWISE is much more impressive than what I saw of Halley’s in ’86 – I only remember seeing this faint wisp that was just visible through binoculars, and right along the horizon. That was pretty underwhelming, but apparently that visit of the comet represented the least favorable viewing on record. It’s funny that I don’t have a strong impression from Hale-Bopp back in ‘96, because it was apparently so bright that it was easily visible in large cities.

During Governor Scott’s press conference today, I heard some other impressive numbers: VT now has the fewest total COVID-19 cases in the country (HI recently lost ground to VT), as well as the lowest % positivity. The % positivity is harder to check, but the total cases is mentioned in the Messenger article below: https://www.samessenger.com/news/even-with-fewest-cases-in-country-vt-mask-mandate-still-possible/article_fc2dbdf8-cb76-11ea-8e09-6f652c493a32.html

That’s a great perspective. If that nearby Randolph site is reflective of the snowfall in the general area… then simply LOL. Based on the numbers I’ve seen, it won’t matter the long wave pattern, the storm track, the rain/snow line, the temperature departures, the states of the indices, or whatever factors people are going to discuss and stress over – the snow is just going to come in hand over fist. I guess it’s possible, but I can’t imagine the area can really get to those types of insane snowfall numbers without at least some type of upslope component, so you’re probably looking at an average of roughly 100 days a year with some sort of snowfall. I’m going to assume that you’re not like some on the forum that just want the occasional big storm to hit and then clear out so they don’t have to deal with that dreaded “nuisance” snow… because I have a suspicion that the winters in that area don’t quite run like that.

Our snowfall relative to average was even worse at around 46%, so I thought our area had it bad relatively speaking – until I saw some of the SVT numbers from backedge. I guess they really got the shaft. In terms of receiving sizeable storms, it doesn’t seem as if it was as bad around here relative to some places – the top five storms in terms of snowfall amounts were: 1. 11.2” - 1/18/16 - Upper level low/inverted trough + upslope 2. 7.3” - 1/12/16 - Clipper-redeveloper 3. 6.6” - 12/29/15 - Southwest flow event; Winter Storm Goliath 4. 5.4” - 2/8/16 - General upper level trough moving into Northeast plus moisture from Winter Storm Mars offshore 5. 5.0” - 4/6/16 - Low pressure tracking through St. Lawrence Valley It’s relative of course, but another aspect of that season that makes it such a pain in the data set is that it’s the only one in my records without a storm ≥ 12”, so it screws with any calculations involving that parameter.

The statistics say your guess is probably correct. Using the latest stats for our location, the snowfall deviation on that 2015-2016 season was an incredible -2.29 σ, meaning it should fall in the bottom 1.1% of all seasons. So, it’s essentially a 1 in 100-year event that most of us will probably not see again in our lifetimes. Based on snowfall observations up to that point, it seemed that 100” of snow was probably the practical floor for snowfall around here – even that very poor 2011-2012 season brought 115” of snow. Indeed, the stats say that getting below 100” of snow in a season here should only happen in the bottom few % of seasons (probably something in the range of 1 in 20 to 1 in 50 seasons, so the 72.2” that season was a massive aberration as your Stowe numbers indicated). It’s also interesting to note that even in that very unusual/aberrant season, our snowfall here was still right around 50% of your Stowe/Mansfield number as it usually is.

Today was awesome, especially after that period of humidity. It’s interesting to note that even in July, the average lows around here are still in the 50s F, and in order to get down to those temperatures, you typically need to have dew points down in that range, so our “average” weather should be COC weather. Whenever we have those stretches where dew points and lows are well up into the 60s F, they have to somehow be balanced out by something to get those average lows in the 50s F, but those must be some chilly July nights.

After your previous discussions on this weather-related forum regarding relocation, I immediately assumed you were referring to Pittsburg, NH. It seems that they average more than 100” of snow a season. Interestingly, the spelling of the town there is without the “h” at the end though.

I guess it was a relatively short stretch of those higher dew points, but you’re so right about how funny it is that these low and even mid-60s F dew points feel amazing. It’s so nice to be back to something at least resembling NNE summer weather – heading out for rides the past couple of days has been so much more comfortable. Thankfully we haven’t had to turn on the A/C yet this summer like we did a couple of summers back, but we were starting to contemplate it for those final couple of days where it was getting tough to get the house below 70 F. We should be passing peak climate temperatures around here in the next week though.

There are those times when one wonders if it’s just the radar beam sneaking through the gap in the Greens and giving the impression of more precipitation. But the ground truth on liquid and snowfall numbers year after year suggests that there really is some sort of convergence going on around here that consistently wrings out that extra moisture.

The gauge collected ~1.40” here, so we’re in that sort of range.

I saw that interesting look, and it indeed it almost looks like another Winooski Valley sort of thing: It’s been a nice steady rain without any runoff issues, so hopefully it soaks in well.

It was a bit gusty for a time, but no power issues. On the rain side, we had about 0.80” in the gauge when I last checked about 15-20 minutes ago – the rain has been steady but lighter since then. It looks like we’ve got a bit more to go, but in any event it’s been a nice drink for the lawn – we’d only had about ¾” of rain up to this point on the month, so this will more than double the total.

Literally just after I sent that message I got a text that we were put under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning.

We’ve had at least a couple rounds of showers today so far here at the house, but nothing that added up to more than a trace. This round definitely looks more serious though, and we’re already getting a steadier rain even out ahead of those stronger echoes. I did get a text alert just after 2:00 P.M. that we’re under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch.