The East Coast snowstorm nicknamed Izzy spared the immediate Capital Region from the worst.
Sunday afternoon officials warned Izzy would bring coastal and inland flooding, ice, and high winds. Municipalities readied snow plows and warned residents. The storm is dropping up to a foot in the Catskills, Adirondacks, Green Mountains and Berkshires. Weathering Heights meteorologist Roger Hill, based in Worcester, Vermont, says Izzy arrived with a bang.
"It's a pretty impressive storm," Hill said. "There's no doubt about it. This is a very deep area of low pressure that has taken kind of an odd track. Originally, it looked like it could have been a what we call a Miller A nor'easter, which is the biggest more revved up types of nor'easter, a well matured coastal bomb that cuts across the coast or up the coast and then into the Gulf of Maine, and so forth. This is an inland track. And it's causing a lot more winds, the area of low pressure is just about as deep as what we we see it with as we call nor'easters. And its track, it pulled a lot of strong winds, there's a low level jet greater than 75 miles an hour, a lot to say about 3000, 4 or 5000 feet above. And that has moved north just ahead of the area of low pressure and interacted with mountain terrain, producing a lot of power outages in parts of Vermont and various other places."
The snow coincides with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, with many commuters at home due to schools and offices closed, which made for a relatively pain-free dig-out.
"The immediate impact was early this morning we had about four inches of snow on the ground and we had five flights canceled going out of the airport."
Albany International Airport spokesperson Doug Myers says operations are nearly back to normal with the clearing of the runways, taxiways and gate areas.
"Albany did not receive the amount of snow that they received in the Southeast, and airports like Charlotte were extremely impacted with over 1000 cancellations and that we had a couple of flights going into Charlotte late yesterday and early today that were canceled," Myers said. "But things are now returning to normal here in both Albany and in the Southeast."
Myers advises fliers to check albanyairport.com for updates.
The weather prompted the cancellation of Albany's annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beloved Community March. Hill says Izzy pulled warmer air off the Atlantic Ocean, which softened its punch in the Capital Region.
"This is still pretty, pretty heavy snowfall across southern parts and central parts of the Green Mountains, the Adirondacks and so forth in our Northeast vicinity," Hill said. "And it's still quite a doozy of a storm, just not a giant prolific snow producer. Maybe not at least where we are. But conditions are such with the high winds and then a little bit of rain, and maybe even a little bit of sunshine and then all of that rotating north and then we get on the backside of the area of low pressure, but much lighter precipitation, but that's going to draw in once again more arctic air by tomorrow. During the day we'll see temperatures actually falling through the day, instead of rising and with a little more of an Arctic shot and temperatures going below zero by tomorrow night.”
Hill says so far this winter, Northern Vermont is "snow-starved."
"We haven't seen hardly any snow this winter, it's been a joke," said Hill. "And it's really depressing. A lot of folks for ski resorts and folks who like winter and go out snowshoeing and take advantage of our, you know our white gold because it is a real good thing for the economy. We haven't really had a lot of it and we'll take what we can get up here we like snow. We just don't like rain and we've had a lot of freezing rain events, a lot of ice and a lot of rain. And of course these incredible oscillations in temperature has been going up and down really since going back until late October, early November."
As of late Monday morning, across Vermont 26 towns were experiencing power outages, with 736 customers affected.
https://greenmountainpower.com/outages/
National Grid reported 10 outages in the Albany area, affecting 110 customers.
https://outagemap.ny.nationalgridus.com/
94 customers were without power in Central Hudson’s service area.
https://stormcentral.cenhud.com/
There were also minor outages in NYSEG’s area.
