If I could describe the way many folks conduct daily banter and conversation especially with our oldest friends, a substantial percentage always seems dedicated to discussing "the way things used to be" and I would imagine that every generation has their own special reverence for how great things were 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I am fascinated with this on a philosophical level, but I am not going down the road when discussing our recent winter season; instead, I would offer that the same applies when it comes to talking about weather. Folks love to talk about the way things used to be with weather and folks that ski at Mad River Glen love to talk about the way our ski seasons used to be. If you've spent anytime wondering we got a good answer with the weather we just had this past winter. It was very much a throwback winter and I'll go through the reasons why. Though we didn't have the big March that many recent winters have featured, we had a succession of months December, January and February, that were the coldest in 3 years and the season was highlighted by a nearly 2 month period without rain that started on the first day of the year.
The colder weather is certainly the more obvious "throwback" part of the recent season. 5 consecutive winters prior to this one have featured mild temperatures, some extremely mild and many months within this 5 year stretch rank as the warmest or top 5 warmest months recorded. This past December, January and February broke from that and absolutely defied many of the preseason expectations and assumptions I made in November. One of the nicest things about doing this weather blog as a fun contribution is that when the weather surprises to the cold/snow side I can spend my time enjoying a bad forecast rather than anything else. In this case, it was the persistence of the cold which came as a huge surprise to me given some of the preseason obstacles. More on that in a bit.
The 2nd "throwback" aspect of the recent winter was the return of the "clipper". The famous quote attributed to Mark Twain certainly applies here - reports of the clipper's death have been greatly exaggerated. In reality, the clipper and the classic nor'easter have a bit of a rivalry with one seemingly coming at the expense of the other. Since the turn of the century, many winters have been highlighted by memorable nor'easters and while some have delivered big snow to northern Vermont, others have missed the state entirely. In the case of the latter it is a double whammy since a miss on a classic coastal type storm means little or no snow for Vermont with nearby clippers getting zapped of energy and moisture. This winter featured the opposite. It was like pulling teeth to get any coastal storm to form. Many of the storms advertised on model simulations fell apart and as that happened, every clipper found a way to deliver for the northern Green Mountains. It made for a fantastic mid-winter snow season for Mad River Glen and even better for spots like Stowe, Smuggs and Jay Peak which in the latter case saw 400 inches of snow.
Lower preseason expectations were predicated on the assumption that the PDO index would remain very negative through the winter season. Inter-season noise in the index is difficult to predict, yet there was still good reasons to make that assumption. The autumn values for the PDO rivaled some of the lowest ever recorded dating back over 100 years. Additionally, the previous several winters with similarly amplified negative PDO values have featured rather erratic weather patterns consistent with what you might expect. This past winter did not follow with the recent prior winters however and the PDO which began the winter season by recording a -2.39 index ended with a much closer to neutral -0.49 index. Furthermore, the index rise happened quickly and early so that it likely wasn't a substantial driving force on the weather pattern by January when the index had risen to -0.55. In reality, it's hard to quantify how much of a force the index is playing on the weather, it's merely an educated guess. Regardless, it was refreshing to see more a more neutralized sea surface temperature configuration in the Pacific and adverse upstream forces were not as evident this winter relative to recent prior seasons.
The word "neutral" was in fact a big theme of the recent winter. Expectations for the ENSO (La Nina or El Nino) were high prior to the season. A lot of winter forecasts priced a sizable La Nina into expectations and that broke down rather early; in fact, by the time I did the preseason outlook I had tempered my expectations of such an occurrence. It proved to be a worthy realization since the ENSO more or less remained neutral through the winter though there has been a recent turn toward La Nina the last few weeks and this is worth watching for hurricane season and next winter. La Nina can mean very active hurricane seasons due to a less shearing ambient jet stream environment. A moderate or strong La Nina for the winter can be hit and miss. Even the good winters however are often rudely interrupted by rainy or icy intrusions.
November began in unspectacular fashion and though certainly ended colder than it started, we didn't have the multiple feet of snow that November 2023 brought to give the season an early boost. Still, we got a storm at the end of the month and began December with some snow on the ground. It was at that point when the season began to show signs that it would diverge both from prevailing expectation and from recent trends. The jet in the Pacific weakened substantially and provided support for colder weather for the first two weeks of the month. Snowfall for the first week of the month accompanied the colder weather and the pattern should have delivered a nice storm on December 11th; instead, the storm took a rather impolite northward turn and brought us a widespread heavy rain for the entirety of the day. The cold rain did not melt off all the snow and the precipitation ended as some snow on the 12th, setting us up for a cold bluebird mid month weekend. The subsequent winter solstice weekend was the best of the month and foreshadowed many winning weekends to come later in the winter. Snowfall late in that week preceded some of the coldest weather of the season, which landed on us on the evening of the solstice and brought temperatures down to 10 below on the 23rd. The days prior to Christmas featured an old fashion New England cold hole. The upper air pattern pointed to warm, but without much wind, temperatures in Vermont were stuck in the 20's during the day while falling to below zero at night. It all made for one of the better Christmas skiing days in several years. Unfortunately, our luck would run out with a wind driven rain on the 30th accompanying near 50-degree temperatures. Much of the exposed snow was wiped out by New Year's Eve and we, as we often have been, had to start from a very minimal base in 2025.
2025 brought instant improvement and most importantly, some sustained cold weather powered again by a loosened Pacific jet stream and a supportive AO. Following a December that featured daytime temperatures that were more than 6 colder vs 2023, January delivered the same and was more than 10 colder during the overnights. The intensity became an afterthought verses the sustainability, since readings remained below the freezing mark on the mountain for the entirety of the month and well into February. The snowfall situation, which was pretty dire on New Year's Day, improved immediately beginning with a few inches on the first and even more on the 2nd of the month. The personality of the winter then became more evident as several smaller more clipper-like disturbances consistently overperformed for Mad River Glen while snow lovers in coastal areas of New England grew impatient. It was "the clippper" returning to its former glory that really made January and the ensuing February special and much of the snow fell on the weekends. The first full weekend of 2025 featured single digit temperatures with several inches of cold smoke. More snow on the 7th, 8th and 9th led us to another spectacular 2nd weekend of the month featuring more comfortable temperatures. By the middle of the month, snow conditions were amazing and we continued to overperform on the smaller events, scoring over a foot of snow on the 14th and 15th of the month. The subsequent weekend was yet another winner with more snow atop the several feet that had already fallen. A widespread outbreak of arctic cold, encompassing a large section of North America managed to dry things out in Vermont starting on MLK day . Accumulating snow didn't return until Sunday, January 26th, though again, it was snow rather than something else and this snow continued to fall for many of the remaining days of what was a fantastic January.
There were ominous signs on some of the model simulations for early February though cold weather never appeared as if it would totally relinquish its grip on New England and it never really did until very late. Amazingly, much of the month was even better than January. 14 of the first 18 days in February featured accumulating snow. Smaller events continued to deliver and some bigger more organized events also brought snow to interior New England. Much like January, the weekend was the time to ski, and the first and 2nd of the month, though cold, had some fresh snow once again. The morning of February 2nd was the coldest of the season with readings reaching 15 below, but sunshine and calm winds and then evening snow made a quick memory of that. Some of the best days of the season happened in the 4 day period between February 6th and 9th. New snow every day, comfortable mid-winter temperatures and a well established base put an exclamation mark on what was nearly 40 days of sub-freezing temperatures and rain/ice free weather. The 2nd week of the month did, in fact, feature some ice and rain threats. The first came on the 13th, a snow event that turned to a period of sleet though no ice. The 2nd was the most anticipated event of the season and certainly the most organized and strongest winter storm. Cold arctic air settled over the region on the 14th and provided an excellent overrunning surface for the storm coming at us from the west. Arctic air successfully fought off the warm air, especially over northern Vermont where Jay Peak was the big winner. Mad River glen saw heavy, wind driven snow, a few hours of sleet on the afternoon of Sunday February 16th and then more snow for early Monday, February 17th. The sleet compressed snowfall totals though it was still the biggest of the season. The outstanding conditions resulting from that storm continued through a cold ensuing week. The shallow arctic cold did dry conditions out and it was a windy stretch making the wind chill situation a bit challenging. As a whole, February was one of the best months in the past 10-15 years and might have been #1 except for the last week. Forecast models showed a promising situation, but we lost AO support in rather dramatic fashion and mild air enveloped much of the country, even in northern Vermont where the streak of sub-freezing mountain weather finally broke on the 25th. We also saw too different periods of rain although the highest elevations managed to avoid most of it.
We got one final taste of mid-winter weather on the first weekend of March (the 1st and 2nd) and then the pattern relented and did so quite dramatically. Thanks to the deep base, the warm weather that enveloped the region in March brought some terrific ski days of a different kind. I was trying to keep score at home and counted 7 days where we saw both sunshine and 55-plus temperatures. It doesn't seem like much but that's actually a fantastic number for March. The end of the month featured 2 events with heavy snowfall but you had to get on the mountain early before precipitation changed to ice and rain. We saw a bit of everything in early April. Our coldest temperature of the month was set early on April 2nd and 36 hours later the area was getting doused with heavy rain, thunderstorms and 60-degree temperatures. Some occasional snowfall and chilly temperatures kept deep snow on the mountain through April 16th when a warmer pattern settled over the region. The Mt Mansfield snowstake peaked in late February but made a late March and early April recovery and very nearly set a seasonal high. As of this writing, snowfall at the stake is finally ready to dive under 20 inches.
My big take away from this recent season was this "throwback" quality to the winter. The core winter months (December, January & February) were all colder than the year prior and the clipper made a return. The interplay between the "clipper" and the "coastal" I find especially fascinating. They can't really seem to coexist. Being that the coastal, were it to be present, easily would assume the role of most dominant weather feature on the weather map, the presence or absence of this feature directly would impact snowfall from the clipper-type systems. Being that the "coastal" was absent this year, the clipper was allowed to deposit snowfall on the Green Mountains and this snowfall, quite routinely, outperformed expectations. Seems like a good academic research project from someone capable of performing such a study (certainly above my pay grade from an intellectual standpoint). My intuition tells me that the absence of coastal storms this year relates to specific sea surface temperature patterns in the coastal Atlantic Ocean waters, but I could be wrong. During the height of our glory, early in February, models were predicting over 30 inches of snow for parts of the New York City region and all but 3 inches failed to materialize. Most of the snow fell over Vermont.
Thanks again to all the readers for allowing this to continue and a specific thank you for allowing me the liberty of playing all that music. 75 different songs in 75 different years of MRG operations. It was a fun distraction from other stuff and educational. Enjoy the summer !
