tamarack

2-day total 0.13". 15-day total 0.19". Next chance Saturday?

That final clump of precip early last evening looked like it might drop a tenth or 2 here but it died on the vine. 13 hours of occasional mist and sprinkles added 0.01" to the 0.12" I measured at 7 AM yesterday. June hasn't quite reached the 0.2" mark here. Edit: March is another month with 2 years having more here than there, though both were BN here. March '16 had a modest 6.0" and March '20 had 15.5" thanks to the snow season's biggest event (10.3") on 23-24. This past March made up for those, squeezing out 0.1" that was really 0.005".

That Dec. 17 event was outside of my totally arbitrary "Grinching" period - 20th-28th. And we were well north of the good stuff (story of winter 20-21) and got 1.9".

Looks better for you than me. Should get something here over the next 2 hours but the heavy duty stuff looks to stay south. Sun just broke thru the clouds 30 minutes ago and temps are still in the 60s. And the fat lady has sung when this current patch of echoes has gone by.

Hit the jackpot. 25 years ago about this time of year we were walking thru a few yards of sweet fern in Lowell, Maine (near WMNF) and when back in open field I had to brush off 20+ dog ticks from the bottom 10" of my right pant leg.

Maybe quenched your usually active sense of humor on this one? Seems more serious than warranted, even though the numbers here show a significant warmth, liquid precip and lack of snowfall for the few days running up to and immediately after the 25th. Probably a statistical fluke and if I had 100 years POR here rather than just 23 the anomaly would disappear. However, I like exploring wx anomalies (don't we all, here?) so I mention this one fairly frequently.

Wait until late month. Four times in the past 12 months we've averted setting low-precip records with late-month events, including one that came within one day of eclipsing the driest month in our 23+ years here. Period Precip Record Final 6/1-28/20 0.69 1.22 4.19 9/1-29/20 0.15 0.84 1.29 (April 1999 had 0.31", our driest month.) 3/1-27/21 0.55 0.94 1.53 5/1-29/21 0.77 1.15 1.73 6/1-14/21 0.06 (Another 0.12" so far on 6/15) Looking forward to an inch or so in the 28-30 period. (And maybe not much between now and then?)

"Settled" and "unsettled" have unfortunately been weaponized by certain factions. I'm no climatologist (the UMaine forestry curricula included very little on the subject when I was there in the early 70s ) but can understand the science enough to see that increasing GHGs result in warming temps, unevenly due to non-anthropogenic factors (thank you, Pinatubo) but trending upward. Predicting just how much the climate will warm given various GHG scenarios and timeframes is a range rather than a point (like essentially all models, even on rather slow-moving entities like trees) and that "unsettled" factor is grabbed by some who ignore the settled part of the science. Reminds me a bit like forecasting precipitation - mets are usually quite skillful at telling me when it will rain (a week ago this Mon-Tues was ID'ed, accurately) but less precise in predicting who will get how much, and the forecasts include such uncertainties. Some wise person coined the phrase, "Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good." AGW science isn't perfect but it's definitely good.

It's a dry heat (like my oven.)

Works well in Maine as well, until one reaches 70. I don't think they'd let one take the eyesight exam online.

We had half of a men's quartet from New Brunswick Bible Institute stay with us that Saturday night after a seasonably cold day - 16/-1. In the Sunday pre-dawn the temp dived, into the minus teens by the time we crammed their dry-cleaner bagged suit jackets under our tiny Chevette's hatchback. When we got to the St. John Bible Church after a 10-mile drive, they watched those thin plastic bags shatter (40 mph gusts helped the cold) as the suits were taken from the car. They and their accompanying teacher held a well-attended afternoon meeting at UMFK and I distinctly recall the time/temp sign on the bank switching from 3:45 to -24 as the wind howled. Down to -29 at my 9 PM obs and next morning was the gusty -34 and even with the heater-hose engine warmer running all night the company Chevy Luv (Isuzu) pickup barely started. It was snowing very lightly as well, visibility a mile or so with 0.1" of tiny snow things falling. Not much accum but with the day's temps at -14/-34 any at all was remarkable. (I'd guess the 'Loaf had similar temps but up the mountain the winds would be twice the velocity. And January 1983 was nearly 13° less cold than the year before, never got below -19 and had little wind. Missed a much nicer winter, temp-wise, though some thaws would've messed with the snow conditions.

That was my worst winter for snow with 48.2" but it included the rare February when I had more snow (17.7") than J.Spin. Also had a bit more, 33.1" in Feb 2013, despite getting a modest 11.3" from the 8-9 storm while nearby AUG and LEW had more than 2 feet. AUG had light-moderate snow all day on the 8th, with 6" on the pavement at our Eastside office. Got home and found less than an inch, and so it went. Only storm in which PWM had 20"+ more than I did since I moved south from Ft. Kent. (They had their 2nd biggest snowfall - 1st at the time - on Jan 17-18, 1979 with 27.1". I had 0.5" on the 18th after recording -8/-47 on the 17th. Jan '79 was a truly weird month in FK, recording 3 of my 5 coldest mornings there with -47, -42 and -39. It also had 5 mornings with minima 33-35; those are the only above-32 minima I've recorded in my 49 Maine Januarys. Despite 6 mornings -29 to -47, the month finished 5.4° AN.)

Coldest I've experienced was -42 at Fort Kent, was in the woods at -40 when the home instrument reached -47 in Jan '79. Coldest WCI was Jan 18, 1982, -34 with winds 30-35, -101 on the old scale, about -73 on the new. Hottest was either Hot Saturday in August 1975 (101 oceanside at BHB) or 7/3 66 when I was cooking burgers and dogs at Curtis-Wight's employees' lake resort in NJJ - NYC had 103 that day and LGA 107. We'd brown the buns by broiling them under the gas griddle flame but couldn't do it that day - they went straight to black. We had a cheap coil thermometer on the side wall of the cooking area, maybe 12' from that griddle. The instrument scale stopped at 120 but the needle had rotated significantly beyond that mark, at least to 140° there. What it was in the 5' between griddle and serving counter where I spent most of the day, better not to know. I'd never had a cup of hot coffee in my life at that point but learned a peculiar facet that day - iced tea consumption went up and down with the temp (logically) but coffee was directly proportional to how many came thru the gate. Sold more on that superheated day than on any other, because it had the biggest crowd of my 2 summers there.

Wow! 0.12", tripling our June rainfall to 0.18". Only another 5.07" and we'll be at the June average.

Horses (and oxen - thanks, Ginxy), stone boats, sweat and time - still amazes me. Our 80 acres has the road for one line with about 3/4 of the back and far side lines on stone walls and some tree-embedded wire on other lines - no interior stone walls. The open field across the road and the much larger fields 100 yards or so beyond that back wall probably were plowed/cropped in the distant past but are hayfields today. I don't think our lot has ever felt a plow - most is too wet, much has above-ground boulders, but the wire fence points to our acres having been grazed. There's some older cedar and a smattering of 100 ft+ pine but 95% of the trees are <100 years old