A little cooler and wetter, a record-breaking growing season and no days above 90° highlight a ‘normal’ 2014
Have the first five weeks of 2015 already got you feeling like this is the snowiest and coldest winter ever?
With two months left to go, the potential is certainly there. But the winter of 2014 offered up its own share of cold and snowy, with January seeing a low of -14 and a handful more of sub-zero days, while February dished out 34.5 inches of the white stuff.
Those are just some of the many highlights of 2014’s weather locally. The take-away: It was slightly cooler and a good bit wetter than normal, but otherwise, according to those in the know, 2014 was a pretty average year with some memorable (read: soggy) moments.
“We were actually very close” to the norms, said Margaret Curtis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service working out of Gray. For the year, average temperatures (highs, lows, and means) were all within 0.3 degrees of normal. (Data for this story comes from the NWS’s Portland-based monitors.)
Curtis noted that the year was wet, overall, with eight inches more precipitation (melted snow and rain) and nine inches more rainfall than normal. And the “summer was a little cold, with low highs,” but she said no long-term phenomena made 2014 stand out.
That’s not to say there weren’t a few abnormalities. The deluge that dropped nearly six-and-a-half inches of rain on Portland in a single day (that was Aug. 13, and the number represents more than two times the normal rainfall for August) is one example.
What you had there was “a really moist air mass,” said NWS meteorologist Chris Kimball, who also works out of Gray and who put together the 2014 annual climate report for the area. “Portland was in the bull’s-eye with the advancing system and air coming off the Gulf of Maine,” said Kimball.
Portland was one of several areas, according to Kimball, that saw record-setting rain and flash flooding from that storm. Meanwhile, 50 miles inland, they only received a few inches.
But Maine has been experiencing wetter summers for many years. In fact, seven of the last nine summers have seen above-average precipitation, according to Kimball.
Climate change? That’s tricky to determine, said Kimball.
“I wouldn’t say you could really ascribe any one event to longer-term patterns like that,” he said, though he admitted that warmer temps in Maine would probably lead to more precipitation.
So is the state likely to stay wetter in the summers?
Yes, “at least for the temporary future,” said Kimball. But, he said, it is difficult to determine the duration of weather cycles and it may be the case that we begin seeing dry summers again. It’s also easy for isolated incidents to outweigh averages in our minds.
One phenomenon that did make the report: Last year had the first October on record with no freezing temperatures, according to Kimball.
But the NWS meteorologists warn that it’s too easy for the anomalies — rather than the averages — to come to mind when we recap the weather.
“What I’ve found in talking to people is that memory doesn’t normally match the statistics,” said Curtis.
As in many years, 2014’s winter months saw high variability in temperatures and precipitation. January, for example, recorded a low of -14 and a high of 51 degrees. February saw almost three times the normal snowfall, while March had less than a third of the norm.
But even this variability is usual for Maine, say the experts.
“We do see a lot more variability in the winter,” said Curtis. “Those scenarios are quite common for the area.” And it’s particularly variable when it comes to snow, she said.
“What I’ve noticed is the weather seems to work in patterns that are normally a month to a month-and-a-half long,” explained Kimball. “We’ll be in a dry period where all the storms miss us, and then have a month” with a lot of precipitation. This, he said, explains the very wet period of weather that marked the beginning of 2014 and the period of lower precipitation that we’ve seen for the last two months. But that’s changing again.
“We’ve just switched over to a more active pattern,” he said, with last week’s storm and upcoming anticipated storms testifying to that position.
The state received a lot of snow early in 2014, despite the fact that the year set records for longest growing season and latest date of first fall freeze (both since record keeping began in 1941). The month of November recorded more than 10 inches of the fluffy stuff, more than five times the normal amount. And Curtis recalled that the “Thanksgiving storm was very heavy,” leaving a quarter of a million people in the dark next door in New Hampshire.
Still, she said, “climate is a big average. It doesn’t mean the day-to-day doesn’t vary. It’s looking at the long-term.”
One local specialist in long-term climate predictions — the Farmers’ Almanac — was pretty much spot-on with its 2014 predictions, according to its publishers.
“Last year we said it would be a very cold, very frosty winter,” said Sandi Duncan, managing editor of the 196-year-old publication, “that the days of ‘shivery’ will return.”
“And that definitely came through,” she said.
Their summer 2014 predictions were slightly off, admitted Duncan, when they predicted “oppressive humidity” and thunder, but they were eerily accurate with their forecast of a “huge storm” to strike on the day of the Super Bowl.
“It happened about eight hours after the” game, said Duncan.
And her predictions for 2015? Winter “won’t last quite as long as last year,” she said. However, they are predicting it will be “quite cold at the end of January and into February.” And she advised: “Be safe. Take a vacation in March or” you may have to wait till April for warm temps.
As for the NWS, despite the memorable cold and snowy start, Kimball suggested 2015 may be another relatively normal year. According to data from the NWS’s Climate Prediction Center, “there are not a lot of climate indicators” that would imply anything abnormal. “The best we can say is” that the 2015 forecast “is somewhere around normal.”
2014 by the numbers
88: High temperature, set on Aug 27 (the 3rd coolest yearly high temperature since record keeping began in 1941)
-14: Low temp, set on Jan. 4
140: Number of days with temperature of 32 or below
37: Number of days with temperature of 80 or more
0: Number of days with temperature of 90 or more
12: Number of 24-hour periods with a temperature change of 30 degrees or more
31: Number of two-day periods with a temperature change of 30 degrees or more
17: Number of days with observable fog
33.7: Average temperature for December (4th warmest December since record keeping began in 1940)
13: Days with at least 1 inch of precipitation
6.43: Inches of rain dumped on Portland in a single storm, on Aug. 13 (more than twice the normal monthly amount for August)
1: Rank for 2014 in two categories: Longest growing season, 196 days; and latest date of the first fall freeze, Nov. 3 (since record keeping began 1941)
5: Days with at least six inches of snowfall
9.2: Most snow, in inches, in a single day, Feb. 13
43: Daily records (temperature, snowfall, or precipitation) set or tied in 2014
Data taken from monthly reports at http://nowdata.rcc-acis.org/gyx and the annual report written by NWS meteorologist Chris Kimball at http://www.weather.gov/climate/getclimate.php?wfo=gyx
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