tamarack

Very modest "extremes" in temp the past 2 months. My mildest since Nov. 5 is 46, and except for the brief -9 on 12/21 my coldest has been -2. Since my current average minimum is 6° and 2 weeks from now will be 2°, temps have been AN and meh, especially since early December. Another little snow event yesterday, quite different from the day before. That earlier one was RA to SN, an inch of 10:1 that frosted the twigs. Yesterday it was 1.1" from 0.04" LE in dry flakes and evening feathers. Maybe 3 +/- one-inch events in 4 days with tomorrow's entry?

That ukie run started at 8 this morning, so includes whatever was progged from the current little duster.

Perhaps the most awesome inversion I've seen from GFS - can't recall ever seeing modeled temps colder at H9 than at H5 (and 13C below H8 for AUG.) Verbatim AUG's 1.5" qpf looks 1/4 RA, 1/4 ZR/IP, 1/2 SN in that order. Highly doubt that sequence.

We hear a great horned on occasion but have yet to see one here. Barred owls, and saw-whets during the milder seasons, make up 95%+ of owl calls heard around home. On T-Day (or near it) we had a barred owl sit like Mitch's pic but in a hardwood tree for an hour or so until some blue jays mobbed it and it left.

October 1947 in Maine - 25° cooler but same situation. The CF turns winds from SW to NW, so that the fire's left flank (as one sees from in front) suddenly becomes the head. Very dangerous, and since a typical large fire has wider flanks than its head, strong wind plus wider head often means disaster. I read 500,000 animals dead, not sure how they came up with that stat but some of the videos are heartbreaking Wildlife biologists usually make estimates of animal populations. That plus burn area offers a very rough estimate of casualties.

Top ten Decembers I've measured, from a variety of places: 1. 61.5" 1976 Fort Kent 2. 47.3" 1978 Fort Kent 3. 46.2" 2007 New Sharon 4. 46.1" 1981 Fort Kent 5. 44.8" 1983 Fort Kent 6. 43.2" 1995 Gardiner 7. 39.9" 2016 New Sharon 8. 38.4" 2003 New Sharon 9. 34.6" 1977 Fort Kent 10. 32.3" 1984 Fort Kent My 9 Decembers in Fort Kent averaged 36.4" and I never had 40+ in another month there - 39.5" in Jan. 1977 is closest. #11 is either 2013 in New Sharon or 1966 in NNJ, each about 31". This year's 15.9" ranks 13th of 22 here, 26th of 47 since moving to Maine. (Add NNJ, using sites near where I lived, makes this year 31st of 73 - yay, top half!)

My average low temp dropped into single digits just after Christmas, and the last 6 days have not even gotten below 20 - will be 7 with today and may not end until Monday. For grins (and groans) I compared those 6 days to the same dates 2 years ago: 16-17: 1.8/-23.2/-10.7; 28.6° BN 19-20: 32.5/21.3/26.9; 9.0° AN Highs 31° milder, lows 44.5° milder.

First half of my 7" total was 7.6:1 rimey/tiny flakes. Nicer stuff dropped 3" 7A-noon, tinies 0.5" nonn-3, 2nd half snow was 12.5:1 and storm total ratio 9.5:1. I'd be happy to score 3" from the weekend event, especially since there's still a chance of zero.

Top 20 on Kevin W's table include 9 from MA, 5 from NH, 4 from VT, and 2 lonely ones from Maine - South Portland and Portland (of course!)

Coastal sites don't even need a BD for crazy temp swings (in this case, upward) - early in April 2010 a wind shift from E to SW rocketed temps in PWM from 59 to 84 in 15 minutes.

Ellsworth was his home, IIRC, about 10 miles NE of Blue Hill. Demand. If you can offer higher resolution, in my backyard type forecasts that's what people are going to want. And we don't have the computing power to run two versions. And running a coarse model and downscaling it to 13 km isn't really helping improve things either. Probably way too simplistic, but if those resolution numbers represent square "pixels" then 13km offers about 38 times as many bust opportunities as does 80.

70.027W here. Not sure exactly where on CC/ACK those two live. And Borderwx take the north trophy. We've had some people from Ft Kent and Eastport in the past. When I joined Eastern in March 2005 the fellow in Fort Kent was posting some impressive snow pics, with more from the post-Christmas 3-footer that year. I think he moved sometime after 05-06. Don't recall any posts from EPO. Either I missed them or they came prior to 3/05.

Thanks. And just to stir the pot, I have to admit that I generally use the term "ice storm" any time there's enough accretion to affect tree posture, often when it's well short of NWS criteria. Promise I'll be more careful in the future. "A day I haven't learned something is a day I've wasted."

Drooping branches can shed snow, not so much for ice. However, that droop allows branches to support other branches. Also, the needles of higher branches reduce the load on the lower ones, and the drooping branches reduce catchment area. The upward branching of most deciduous species means any bending under ice increases the catchment area. (White pine is in a middling position. It lacks the abundant branching of spruce and fir and thus offers little "load sharing" and while its horizontal branches allow the droop to limit damage, most of the WP - especially those grown in the open as opposed to in full tree cover - have some upward branches, which are usually the first to go as accretion builds. In the 1998 ice storm, I didn't see a single evergreen with the main trunk broken though a couple leaning hemlock had been uprooted. Spruce-fir tended toward zero damage while white pine generally lost some limbs. At our Hebron lot on Greenwood Hill, where grass stems had accretion the diameter of s soda can, several pines had suffered cascading breakage on one side (generally toward windward) when upper branches failed and started an "avalanche".

I'm about 42 miles north of Jeff and at 390' a bit higher, and 57 miles NNE of (though 300+ lower than) Lava Rock. No elevational help here and longitude can be good or bad depending on track, but topography makes the Maine foothills perhaps the CAD kings of New England.

Climo will, eventually, assert itself as in 07-08, 13-14 and last winter. However, there's been more than average, it seems, when the opposite occurs - 02-03, 04-05, 09-10, 14-15. The 2nd and 4th of those winters were good here, great to our south.

Yesterday pulled the month out of D-level, but it's still only C/C-, probably the latter. Snowfall was 84% of the month's average and temp was essentially average (0.1° AN.) The lack of temp extremes also pulls the grade down a bit. Highest was 46 and lowest -9, with just that day (21st) colder than -2. For December in this frost pocket, those minima were pretty lame. Finishing with a nice 7" event was great but can't cover the fact that 3" was next biggest snowfall. A decent, nothing outstanding (here), average December.

Sadly true - I'm at approx. 44.66 N. Don't know exactly where PF's and Alex's homes are, but using 1.2 miles per (latitude) minute, I'd guess I'm 10-15 miles N of PF, maybe twice that far N of Alex. We used to have posters from Aroostook and more recently one from the BGR area. By far the biggest geographical hole in the New England sub-forum is the northern 2/3 of Maine. That's about 30% of NE's area though probably less than 3% of the population.

Lesser Antilles, next August. Good to see an active start to the year after a sort-of-Grinch for Christmas. (No rainer but some snow-settling temps and lots of meh)

0.2" on the board this morning. Trees still loaded from yesterday's 7" but forecast winds later today should empty everything more than 20' from the ground.

Thanks - yard looks nice entering the new year.

Storm final 7.0". The first 3.5 held 0.41" LE; have not melted the catch for the 2nd but I'm guessing a ratio of 10:1 or a bit higher. 11" at the stake.

6.5" total by noon moves Dc to 15.4", still 4" BN but no longer a disaster and may have picked up a tenth or two after that. With Novie's 8.4" the season is within 1.1" of my average thru 12/31.

Another 3" fell 7-noon for a 6.5" total. Snow has lightened and radar suggests we're in the end game so that may be the final, so 6-10 verified. Some very localized whiteouts as the occasional gusts clear snowy limbs.

Same ratio as my 3.5" (at 7, probably another inch since.) Last evening flakes were heavily rimed, or perhaps seemed that way because dry air wrecked any decent dendrites - gritty stuff. Nicer flakes this morning, but still small and mostly light with a couple short periods of moderate. Almost no wind - lower branches are loaded despite the dry powder consistency of the snow.