This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
Watching the delicate, early morning snowflakes fall Tuesday was all too briefly mesmerizing. A decade ago, the couple of inches already on the ground would have adorned an already deep, mid-January snowpack that had been building since early November, hefty enough by now to all but guarantee winter sports easily lasting until early spring.
But the new normal quickly intervenes on my fantasy. Winters are no longer what they used to be and this snowfall isn’t nearly enough to make much difference: too little to ski on or snowshoe, but a perfect disguise for frozen ruts, intermittent craters and patches of ice, rendering long walks on the road both the only readily accessible winter activity and the easiest option for a quick trip to the emergency room.
Though there are many forces at play here and much can change, one thing looks certain in the extended forecast: The freeze-thaw; snow-rain cycle will continue agonizing snow lovers for several weeks.
Those of us who’ve descended upon Vermont for myriad reasons over the last half-century, I can safely attest, were not anticipating cold, wet and uncomfortable winters. We could have relocated to the Pacific Northwest for that.
I’ve never heard anyone say, ”Great, we’re having slush,” but that’s exactly what we’re having, at least until it turns to ice or mud, and we’d better get used to it, according to some scientists, because that’s the way future winters are shaping up. Climate change writ large? Probably, but it’s complicated.
Even as we come to terms with global warming, we cannot take its implications for granted, any more than we’re able to depend on clouds of snow that annually bury hillsides, muffle sound and spur rumination of the “old fashioned” winters we remember. The complexity of climate science confounds easy labels and simple predictions.
Warming itself isn’t easily categorized and doesn’t always mean what we assume, especially regarding its impacts, which are certainly global, with far-reaching implications that defy conventional wisdom. Warming in one place — the Arctic, for instance — does not translate to warming everywhere.
Chatting with meteorologist Roger Hill, who runs Weathering Heights in Worcester, a forecasting and consulting service, he explains how one seeming contradiction played out in the U.S. with dire results: “Although higher temperatures in the Arctic are increasingly leading to the loss of sea ice, in 2021 those surface changes up north led to cold waves here in the U.S.”
In Texas, these fluctuations prompted the National Weather Service to issue unprecedented statewide winter storm warnings as a combination of snow, ice and bitter cold caused a catastrophic failure of the state power grid, stranding millions in the freezing dark, leaving hundreds dead.
While Hill believes that the melting sea ice plays a significant role in our day-to-day weather, it’s only one factor with some others even farther away, making it difficult to fathom exactly how they could affect winters in Vermont.
“Take Siberia, for instance,” he continues, “When Russia’s far east has a snowy October, it becomes more likely that the Northeast and New England will have a colder, snowier winter.” How this happens is not especially easy to grasp, but Hill is patient with my questions, taking me very close to my pedestrian limit of scientific understanding.
“The Siberian snow cover reflects light, beaming much of the sun’s warmth back into space, dropping the surface temperature in the Arctic,” he explains, “which in turn impacts the stratospheric polar vortex, eventually causing cold waves here in North America.”
Although most people believe the stronger this much-dreaded climate phenomenon is, the lower the temperature will go, but the opposite is the case, according to Hill: “When the circulation around the vortex is strong, the colder air remains bottled up at the pole, but, as it weakens, that circulation is disrupted and waves of cold air flow southward.”
As if this isn’t enough, there remains a whole other series of circumstances that influence the kind of winter weather Vermonters can expect in a given year, including El Nino or La Nina, conditions in the equatorial Pacific that respectively either warm or cool the surface water, subsequently impacting temperature and precipitation in New England.
Storm track is another vital indicator of whether Vermont will get rain, snow or something else out of a specific system. If the upper-level jet stream takes a low-pressure system to our west, the counterclockwise flow of winds bring with them warmer temperatures and mixed precipitation, or just plain rain. An eastern track is an entirely different story, ripe with the possibility as it nears the Atlantic coast of a developing nor’easter or even a “bomb” cyclone — short for bombogenesis, an “explosion” of energy that causes a storm to rapidly intensify in a short period of time.
An hour later, the snow has stopped and the sun is shining brightly, casting long, early morning shadows across a burnished field, lustrous gemstones shimmering in the light. It’s completely gorgeous but I know it’s a facade, a superficial come-on, miles wide and inches deep, a tease, much like the last several winters.
It’s also not nearly enough to plow, of course, so whatever hazards lurk beneath will remain buried, requiring Yak Tracks, hiking poles and the kind of cautious gait that stresses muscles and tendons you didn’t realize you had.
Until it actually happens, I’ll continue dreaming of the kind of snowfall that carries me into the woods, absorbing most sound save the pair of ravens I consistently hear but rarely see as they go about their business and I go about mine through billowing drifts of powder that never fail to intoxicate, luring me into the kind of solitude only deep winter can bring.
