tamarack

27 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

if this nino happened 50 years ago this month would be -4

Maybe, but the 30-year norms of 50 years ago were about 2F lower than the 1991-2020s.

2 hours ago, kdxken said:

53° / 51° another cool start to what it looks like a beautiful day. Mild up beginning the second week of August?  Hartford now stands at 0.4 above average for the month. What happened to the hottest month ever?

Heat/humidity lasted 4 days, 5th and following has been slightly BN.  78/46 here yesterday.

12 hours ago, Damage In Tolland said:

There’s posters here ( ACATT) as an example .. that think this is chilly and below normal and that the month of July is and will finish BN. It’s hard to understand or fathom , but just look at their posts 

I lean ACATT by preference (not forecasting) but think we'll finish July AN, thanks to its first 4 days.  7/1-4 was 10.3° AN while the next 19 days have run 0.6° BN and I think the remainder will be close to norms here.

Enter August 2, 1975!

PWM: 103     BGR: 102    BHB:  100 at water's edge.  All 3 all-timers.
Since my first swim in Maine salt water (August 1952), Hot Saturday is my only time of swimming in actual warm salt water here, just south of Otter Cliffs in Acadia.

15 hours ago, FXWX said:

I'm at ~1,200 ft in Burlington CT and twice say lightning flashes over Rutland VT... About 135 miles away.

And I thought that seeing lightning in Rangeley while driving on US 1 in Searsport (100 miles apart) was amazing, but it was small potatoes compared to that.

17 hours ago, dendrite said:

Congrats @tamarack

The real fun was about 15 miles to our northeast i n Somerset County.  We had a quick 0.20" 1:15-1:25 PM and with the 0.49" overnight, the garden was nicely watered (though July remains BN thru today).

8 hours ago, ineedsnow said:

Some good news! Average temps have maxed out and we start trending downward again! 

We have a long "plateau" here, and since our averages are "live" (every daily entry affects them), the numbers here are as of today.  Our daily mean warms above 65 on July 1 (June's warmth added a full week of 65+) and that lasts thru August 10.  Today's average is 66.04, the only day (currently) above 66, so it's all downhill from here.  Given the short/mid forecasts, I think this summer will end without any 66+.

Last night's 0.49" brought the month to 1.94".  Average thru 7/22 is 2.82".  Might cut the deficit a bit if the storms hit us this afternoon, but not much chance for 0.88" and it's dry for the next 4-5 days.

12 hours ago, vortex95 said:

Thanks.  That's the challenge, is there systemic bias in either direction enough to make it statistically significant, or does it all work out in the end?  And then we have the notion that precision always equals accuracy!  One line I will always recall, "we have very good models today that can give very precise-looking output that can be precisely wrong!"

I saw Fox Brook in the HYDCAR text product.  They don't give any more info for stations in the decode format at least.

 

The forester with whom we contracted in 2011 for forest inventory and modeling once commented, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

When Maine Public Lands contracted an inventory in 1999 (different contractor), the DOD had yet to remove the GPS scramble for non-military users.  We had the foresters run their GPS units for 30 minutes on both the first and last of the 12-point cruise lines, with the goal of having the hundreds of scrambled hits averaging close to true location.  We assumed the hits were truly random rather than biased.

2 hours ago, moneypitmike said:

The season is not record hot/cold until it's over.  Let's' see how the remainder plays out.

Agree.  July is running 2.4 AN so far.  If the month finishes at that mark, JJ 2026 would be 5th warmest of 29, respectable but no record. 
Looking at the rest of July, I'm guessing we'll be 1-2° AN at the finish.

0.21" brings the month to exactly 1.00".  Yesterday's gloomy clouds made for a high of only 63.  With a low of 47, the mean was 11° BN.  Looks like July 2026 won't set a new warmest month, though I expect it to finish AN (currently 2.7 AN).

Still at cloudy 65°, not a great sign of convection to come.

15 hours ago, vortex95 said:

Good point.  Yes, it does matter to an extent.  But each site is different.

The below sounds pedantic and getting into the weeds, but I have found an appreciation of the details working w/ numbers, calcuations, and statistics, their rules, and how it applies to the sciences.

We know the history of BOS wx measuring issues -- temp, precip, and snowfall.
So this is not an isolated or new issue.  And then you have the base issue of ASOS temp considered ok as long as it is within +- 2 F.

The point is marginal of error or uncertainty in measurement is rarely given in the mainstream.  Output/results are often treated as absolute fact.  This is not a good scientific practice.  For example, If a number is known to be accurate to the ones place (whole number), expressing it with a decimal (like a tenth) introduces false precision.  This implies you know the value more precisely than you actually do.  So since ASOS is only reliable within +-2 F, see the problem here?  And then you have individual site calibration issues at times independent of the sensor base accuracy. These wx sensors in the field are not high quality super precise like sensors used in a lab.

And a larger issue not directly related to precision/accuracy, artificial heat sources are becoming more of an issue w/ time, both on a local and large scale where many of these climate locations are, so biased warm is not an unreasonable assumption a lot the time.

Yes I know this complicates things, but if you are going to say that an avg temp over a long period of time is exceeded a previous record by tenths of a degree when you have issues like the above, we can't just ignore the limits of measurements and rules of what is precise/accurate.  It gets worse when you see temps calculated out to the hundredths of a degree (global avg temp, as one example)  That is two orders of magnitude above conventional sensor precision!
 

If the variance within that -/-2 F, once one has hundreds/thousands of observations, the averages should be valid to tenths at least.  (Unless there's a consistent bias toward either + or -.)  Works that way in forest inventory, at least.
 

Coldest I could find outside mtn location in New England is 47 at Fox Brook ME.

There's probably about 10 Fox Brooks in Maine.  My guess is the one on T17R12, immediately west from the town of Allagash.

21 hours ago, wxsniss said:

Thanks for the quick advice guys

I'll probably go with a Generac. I'm a little worried about footprint and available space closest to where our gas/electric intake and meters, but I'll get the consultation and see.

It's easy to lose motivation and keep kicking the can, but I guess worth at least seeing if logistically possible and getting a quote.

We had a 13k Generac installed in spring 2020 - we were getting too old to camp out in our own home.  
Our place has a 200 amp entry panel while the house footprint is only 960 sq.ft., 3 bedrooms including the loft, one bath. The unit itself was a bit over $3,000 but we had more like 10k fully installed - dedicated entry panel plus the labor to place and set up the genny.  Since we are far from having gas in the street, we needed to buy 2 100-gallon tanks (nearly 2 weeks running), have them installed plus the underground link to the generator, along with the 200 gallons of propane.  The 10-year guarantee came with the deal.
Other than bi-weekly test runs (5 min) and short runs - <2 hr, we've had only 3 outages, 10 hours in late Sept 2020, 101 hours in Dec 2023 and 7.5 hours 2 days ago.  We pay for the annual servicing, but when lightning blew apart a tall fir 55 yards from the house, also wrecking the electrical link from genny to panel, the techs fixed it with no charge.

12 hours ago, vortex95 said:

And this not far over the ME border in 1825?  One of largest wildfires in NAMR history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1825_Miramichi_fire

You go back far enough in recorded history, you see that massive events are not as unusual or atypical as they may seem.

 

The Miramichi fire was mostly in NB but also involved some Maine acres.  Since the Baxter Fire in 1977, Maine's biggest wildfires have been about 1,000 acres.  Lorimer's work on forest history in Maine points to stand-replacement events occurring about 800 years apart for any one area.  The state has very little fire-type forest and a cool moist climate with relatively even distribution by month.

My forestry education at U. Maine included only one semester on wildfire behavior/control.  However, 2 historical fires in Maine illustrated some interesting facets.  The largest of the 1947 fires, one which covered about half of the 200k acres torched that October and wiped out the centers of 2 small towns, was already large when a dry cold front quickly changed the wind from SW to NW.  That almost instantly making the long flank into the head and endangering those on that flank side.  At the time, October had had no measurable rain and the last week of September only 0.08".  Given the diurnal ranges at CF time, the air must've been extremely dry.  PWM temps:
10/23   83   35  CF early afternoon?  That night?
10/24   59   26
10/25   65   20

The 2nd fire was in July 1977 at the SW corner of Baxter Park with some Great Northern land also involved.  In November 1974 a heavy wet snow followed by strong NW wind flattened 3,000+ acres.  Due to Governor Baxter's deed of trust, very little salvage was done beyond roadside cleanup.  June 1977 had been wet, but July had had very little rain when lightning ignited the ultra-seasoned tangle of trees in mid-month, the fire covering nearly all of the blowdown area plus some outside of it, about 3,500 acres in total.  The forest had been heavily stocked with mixed hardwoods and softwoods, not especially old but probably about 30 cords/acre and very few trees remained standing after the 1974 event.  Stems were often piled 12-15 feet high.  The forester who was managing the salvage told me that the flames were able to move downhill at night, thanks to the incredible volume of well-seasoned fuel.

52 minutes ago, kdxken said:

 

This coming Monday marks 30 years since MWN's windiest met summer day - the 24-hour average was 99 mph, IIRC.  Friends were getting married at our (then) church in South Gardiner, with an outdoor reception under a large tent, and the wind would work the 4-foot "pins" upward such that we had to monitor them while carrying sledge hammers.

13 hours ago, CT Valley Snowman said:

Power back on here at 7:10 PM.  I hit a couple of détours trying to get back to Flying Pond on 41  from Farmington due to downed trees and wires.  

Genny shut down 8:40 PM, 3rd longest run since it was installed in 2020, though 94 hours lower than Dec 2023.  My wife had to switch lanes a couple times on Rt 2 coming home from Farmington, but no detours, just dodging tree tops.

Any of those tall pines around Flying Pond get blown down?  Couple years back, Maine Cabin Masters had to do a full rebuild on a camp near Flying after several big ones smashed it on Dec 18, 2023.

Still running the genny, approaching 3.5 hr.  Read that 6,000+ w/o power in Franklin County.  Its total population is a bit under 30k.

At 1 PM I noted that we were in a severe-warned block, but when I went to find the parameters, GYX had dropped the SVR as the storm had weakened.  First drops at 1:10 then at 1:15 RA+ and gust after gust arrived - trees pushed around like I hadn't seen since Dec 2023, probably well into the 40s.  Strong but short of SVR criteria.  1:18 the genny kicked in (still running now at 2:15) and the heavy rain backed down by 1:20, nearly stopped at 1:25.  0.29" in the gauge, mostly in the 1:15-1:20 span.   During the lighter rain a surprisingly wet hummingbird landed on the feeder only 3 feet from me and had a long drink.  Only 2 strikes, both distant but enough that the dog hid.  I walked out our gravel road, saw that the outage was caused elsewhere, and confirmed that none of the 120-foot-plus pines had fallen.

45 minutes ago, CT Valley Snowman said:

Took 134 to the New Sharon Dunkin Donuts a few times this week.  Hard to beat the views as far as a quick car ride is concerned.  Taking the kids to hike Bald Mountain Preserve in Camden tomorrow morning.  Usually it's Bald Mountain or Mt Blue in Weld, but I'm out of hiking shape and we are looking to try something a bit different outside of the  Kennebec Highlands trails near us.  

  

Another Bald Mountain to consider is in Oquossoc, part of Rangeley.  It's about 1.3 miles with 900+feet elevation gain to the obs platform, which offers wonderful 360° views - Mooselook Lake to the West and Rangeley Lake to the east, plus lots of mountains.  Last time I climbed it was November 2021, with my son-in-law plus 6 of their 7 kids (the 2-y.o stayed home but the 5 y.o. had a blast) along with 2 neighbor kids.  It's a mile of uphill stroll thru forest then 0.3 miles of steeper, rockier but not vertigo steep, to the summit.

Not much smoke today, but surprisingly breezy along with the forecast lower TD.

12 hours ago, CT Valley Snowman said:

Family cabin on Fying Pond

My ice fishing spot, near the forested island about 1/4 mile from the Rt 41 boat launch.

Three whiffs and we struck out yesterday.  (Or got smoked out)   Had a sprinkle at 10 AM but the opportunities at 6 and 10 PM offered nothing except some grumbles to scare our dog.  All 3 passed to our west.

4 minutes ago, vortex95 said:

Wow, great reports!  "Leaf salad," LOL.  It is amazing how efficient large hail is shreding trees very quickly!

All the hail that has fallen on our yard in 28 years (going on 29) would fit in a 2-pound coffee can.  I was sad to have missed the 2007 storm, but happy that I still had a garden.  

23 minutes ago, vortex95 said:

For reference, the biggest hail in New England is 4"  in SW ME on 6/1/1986.  Here is the Storm Data entry.
 

That event caused near-total defoliation of the trees along Rt 302 in Naples, and probably elsewhere that I didn't view.  The only other significant defoliating storm was 5-10 miles SE from home, in Rome and New Sharon, on August 30, 2007.  Next morning I found 1-2 miles on Rt 27 on the Rome end of Mile Hill as a 2-track thru 6" of leaf salad.  Folks there reported up to 4" deep hail in places away from where water flow gathered the ice.  Perhaps 2,000 acres were stripped and when the Maine Forest Service forester examined things there, she found considerable debarking, especially in Aspen.  Some stripped hemlock did, pines refoliated in the spring, and ash became like bottle-brushes as scores of lateral buds sprouted.  Some 2" chunks were reported but along Rt 27 I found only dimes/nickels/few quarters (at 5 PM 24 hours after the storm).

1 hour ago, wxeyeNH said:

The thick smoke has moved out but wow, the thickest smoke layer I have ever seen.  Below is the Nest Cam time lapse. It started around 9am.  At that time we had the cirrus overhead with the MCS but skies were basically clear after that.  The temperature has jumped  7F in the past hour.  82/69

I'm not sure why the camera was changing the hue of the sky.  Maybe to adjust for the darkness?  

https://video.nest.com/clip/3886a63d346441b9a07cb5463627d987.mp4

 

The smoke has moved here.  Sun tried and failed to work about noon, and by 1:30 we had that same dingy yellow/brown that dendrite posted.  The only thicker smoke I can recall was when I was working at a forest fire.
No 90s here; possibly not even 80s.

1 hour ago, OceanStWx said:

They have not. But it is also exceedingly difficult to rate up to EF3 with tree damage alone.

And the biggest windthrow events since we moved to Maine in 1973 were straight line winds.  In November of 1974, about 12" of wet snow followed by strong NW gales flattened about 3,000 acres on the SW corner of Baxter Park.  Because Governor Baxter's deeds of trust, the only salvage permitted was along the park roads for safety reasons.  In 1977 all that well-seasoned wood was consumed by a wildfire.  The other 3,000-acre blowdown was only 10-15 miles northwest from the Baxter damage - a powerful southeast storm (we had gusts to 50 at Fort Kent) in late October 1980 tipped the spruce-fir stands on T4R11 (mostly); I saw that area from the air in June of 1981 and it looked like a giant version of oats lodged by an August downpour.  Essentially all that wood was salvaged by Great Northern.

50 minutes ago, Chrisrotary12 said:

About as useless as today’s event then. An EF3 will probably rip up a few million trees and no one will know. 

I don't know if Maine has ever had a confirmed EF3 (or stronger).