Howie -
It's still a little early in the the season to have a good sense of how the winter is going to play out. In general, you want to wait until mid-October or so, b/c that's when the patterns for the next few months begin to take shape. In addition, while many in the public hear "El Nino" and immediately think of the weather generally associated with one, no two are alike. We now know that there are various other indeces and phenomona which impact our weather here in the northeast. Sometimes they overwhelm the impacts the El Nino event, sometimes not.
All that said, the vibe I seem to be getting from the weather boards I've read is that this possible weak to moderate El Nino might set the stage for a winter similar to 2002-2003. If that camr to pass, we'd have a great early season (remember those two big dumps in early December 2002?) and it would continue cold until early/mid March, at which time it would all got to hell pretty quickly. Another analog that's been thrown out there is 76-77. I'll attach below a link to a fantastic resource on the SKIVT-L list serve that tracks snow depths at the 3900' level on Mansfield for the last 50+ years. As you'll see, both years I've seen used as analogs started strong, stayed pretty strong, and then died a quick death in March before a brief comeback attempt and final death later in the month or in early April. While 02-03 wasn't necessarily a banner year around hear ala 2000-2001, we should at least expect better results than last year when it just refused to snow south of I-89.
http://www.uvm.edu/~empact/data/gendateplot.php3?table=SummitStation&title=Mount+Mansfield+Summit+Station&xskip=7&xparam=Date&yparam=Depth&year%5B%5D=1976&year%5B%5D=2002&width=800&height=600&smooth=0&csv=0&totals=0
FYI for you tree skiers out there - detailed anecdotal studies of the SKIVT-L archives indicate that the tree skiing begins when the stake hits 40", give or take. Last year, that wasn't an accurate barometer for reasons mentioned above, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, that would be a nice pre-X-mas present this year, no?
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