tamarack

Handful of drops overnight, first since Isaias, and looks like we got 7-10'ed on the two patches of RA this AM. Had a brief heavy shower an hour ago here in Augusta

Almost. Norway is doing better now but up thru the mid-20th their treatment of the Sami was regrettable. That said, I echo PF's impressions of Norway. Our 2017 excursion stayed mostly on the tourist track, but even the grotesquely huge cruise ships at Flam and Geiranger couldn't blunt the awesome beauty of the fjords. Farthest we got from the heavily beaten track was Trondheim - one of my wife's 4 Norwegian grandparents was born there - and there was considerable tourist traffic there though far from the crush in the two fjord towns noted above. Weather was cool for our trip, mostly under 70F (unlike the next summer with its mid 80s) and we saw some RA each of our 8 days in country, though only one rainout and we had planned visits to Oslo-area museums that day anyway.

Almost exactly what my frost pocket site had - only difference was 56 yesterday morning, but we had a fair amount of clouds each night to limit radiating.

For here, strong ENSO in either direction is usually bad news.

Might ping my frost pocket if that were to verify. Earliest frost so far is Sept. 1. To me, "back is broken" means the 2-month stretch of 5-6 AN days for each BN is done. Could still be 2:1 or 3:2, especially as the downward trek is slowly accelerating. By month's end my average is 73/50 and 90% of such days are pure CoC.

One year we didn't get there until the grass was 2 feet tall - don't think we found any nests on that very laborious mowing. Most nests were discovered painlessly - we'd probably anger the yellowjackets on a nearby pass but by the time we came back (big lawns have some advantages) the swarm was obvious and avoided. One time I quit for a water break and when I came back the lawnmower handle had about a dozen residents with a couple hundred circling for a landing. Oh, and the house next door had an inside corner that hosted for decades a huge honeybee hive. When I was 4, one morning I wandered into that corner (attracted to the sound and ignorant? I have no memory of the event) and got well stung. My mom said my hands swelled up as big as hers and that I slept for 30 hours. Glad that the bees weren't nearly as aggressive as yellowjackets! Elsewhere I less benignly found nests next to our house, next to a brook while I was washing breakfast dishes while camping with a friend, and various other encounters.

The improvement uphill from Smalls Falls blew a wide hole thru the 400-acre tract on Twp E that our agency manages. It also eliminated the steep and curvy stretch that had many many crashes. On balance, a clear win.

EWR had a low of 86 to go with that 108 on 7/22/2011. The low was tied the next day and those 2 are warmest minima on record by 2°. That 108 is tops by 3° - half a dozen days have hit 105.

Friend in Farmington got caught in a brief cloudburst yesterday afternoon. Here we haven't even had a heavy dew since Isaias went thru.

Then about 16:30 another monster gust took out the silver maples across the road, and it seemed the heaviest rain came after the 26-minute mark, though that was also when it started sluicing the window. (And that "pine" is/was a Colorado blue spruce though the entire spruce genus is in the pine family. Also, note the tree that's behind the house across the street, in line with that foreground iron lamp holder or whatever. Retained full foliage and branches while other ones broke or partly defoliated or both. Made me wonder what species that was to hold together so well.)

My mom's parents had a summer place in Long Valley (part of Chester, NJ) that had 3/4-acre lawn that we would mow periodically during the summer, with 2-3 yellowjacket nests found per visit. That's where the burnout crater occurred. From age 5 thru 20 I doubt there was a single summer in which I didn't get multiple stings. The critters' love for me remains - several years ago on one of our peer0review field trips, 25 of us were tromping over some logging slash - me toward the middle of the line - when I got hit, hollered "yellowjackets!" and all the folks sped the hundred yards to the spot we wanted to discuss. One of the buggers followed and hit me a third time. (No one else was bothered. )

DeLorme has Long Pond (aka Beaver Mountain Pond) at 1,729' so that lot might be 1800+. View looking south across the pond includes Public Lands' Four Ponds Unit, the lot is handy to Rangeley, 3 miles or so from the AT crossing of Route 4, maybe 5 from Smalls Falls and if it's readily buildable that seems a good price.

Many years ago my dad did the evening gas-and-match to maybe the most populous yellowjacket nest I've seen, judging by the width of the swarm earlier in the day. (How we mower pushers avoided getting stung I'll never know.) Next morning there was a hole bigger than a bushel basket, caused by the burnout of all the underground nest structure.

Rangeley might be getting even pricier than it has always been, what with nearly $40 million being pumped into Saddleback, with plans to open for the first time in 5-6 years. Great mountain, and while Maine can't match the northern Greens for upslope, Saddleback's NW exposure probably gives it the best in the state.

Maybe. I'd note the 2007-08 snow season, with nothing approaching a KU but loads of low-end warning criteria, perhaps analogous to Cat 1&2 events rather than TCs peaking at 45 to 60, and my snowiest winter since Fort Kent. This hurricane season is more like 2004-05, when I had a bunch of small events through early Feb but none even reaching 4". Maybe our TCs could be like that winter, which broke the meh with 21" (and thunder) on Feb 10-11 and 40" more thru March 12.

I'd guess 2020 ACE is less than half of 2005's to date.

Since June 17, only 10 BN days out of 59 (and today will make 10 of 60.) Despite that proportion, temps have run only +2.9 - lots of meh with occasional real heat. Only one day, June 20, was more than 10° AN.

One 1st-order station and one long-term co-op: CAR 81-10 91-20* Diff. % diff Temp 39.87 41.03 +1.16 2.9% Precip 38.79 40.36 +1.57 4.0% Snow 112.36 119.20 +6.84 6.1% Farm. 81-10 91-20* Diff. % diff Temp 42.28 42.96 +0.68 1.6% Precip 48.37 49.34 +0.97 2.0% Snow 86.51 92.14 +5.63 6.5% * 2020 to date. Rest of year might alter 91-20 by a tenth or two if wx is really anomalous. Shedding the low-snow 1980s in exchange for 2011-20 is huge.

That's a great illustration of the Northeast's vulnerability to even a modest (for a hurricane) storm but doesn't alter my opinion of the West Atlantic season being a long parade of weaklings (so far.) And up here the forecast of 1-2" barely made it to 0.7", though even that was welcomed. And we've not had a drop since.

Most of that snow came with temps about 10, with some wind, though we didn't get the good dendrites of farther west - 15.5" from 1.80" LE. Ratio of 8.6-to-1 from tiny flakes. Farmington co-op reported 23.0" but I'd been in town at the height of the storm and later, and their snowfall looked no different than mine. (Not as egregious as 12/6-7/2003 - measured 24" at my place, 40" reported at the co-op. We got to church - 1.5 miles SE from the co-op and 100' higher - during the final flakes and the parking lot had about 2 feet. I'd believe 30, maybe. I had 6" by 9 PM with SN+ and 18" after. Co-op had 14" by midnight - 8" in 3 hr was reasonable - but 26" after midnight was not. With a midnight measure my snow probably would've been 12" in each day. Lots of drifting in that one. )

I should've checked before posting. Hanna (80) and Isaias (85) are the only ones with winds above 65 mph, and the current pair aren't likely to join those two. Meh. In fact, other than the post-equinocal snows, the past 12 months have been one long meh.

Two more in a bunch of dwarf TCs. How many of the 11 so far this year have exceeded 50 mph sustained?

Morning GFS now less than 0.1" and GYX AFD says "sporadic showers." And another day-5 RA event goes away.

Most abrupt and amazing flip I can recall. Nov and Dec each my mildest here, though 2015 eclipsed Dec. Then Jan was +11 thru the 13th and season total snowfall thru that date was 11". The rest of Jan and all of Feb was -7 with 3 advisory events plus V-Day. 1st 9 days of March were 12° BN with -2 aft max on the 6th and daily mean 32° BN on the 8th (my greatest departure here) plus a warning-criteria snowfall. Had 37" in April to cap the comeback - 11" thru Jan 13 and 84" afterwards. Farmington's snowiest April in its 128-yr POR, 50% more than #2.

20+ years a go a group of elderly ladies used the darts method, and their results over a couple years outperformed the Dow and most of the big houses like Merrill-Lynch.