As Christmas 2014 comes to a close I hope the day was for you whatever you had hoped. There’s a lot of pressure around the holidays for everything to be just right and that can sometimes take away from one of the few days this part of the world is quiet.

During Christmas afternoon the temperature at the Portland International Jetport reached a balmy 53F tying the warmest Christmas Day temperature ever reached at the Jetport. However, it’s not the warmest Christmas ever in Portland. If you look at the database of records which goes back to the early 1870’s you will find that on Christmas 1888, the high temperature in Portland was 57F, warmer than today or 1994 when the Jetport temperature also hit 53F.

You might wonder, as I did, why there were news reports of a Portland tying a record high when the city missed it by 4 degrees. The answer is that the temperature readings were taken downtown prior to 1940 when they moved to the Jetport. This means that a Jetport record high temperature was tied today, but the record for the warmest Christmas in the City of Portland stands as 57F back in 1888.

It’s important to make this distinction because saying Portland tied a record excludes 70 plus years of data, or about 50% of the records we have for Maine’s largest city. There is precedence for including all the Portland data in this conversation. Boston’s temperature database also goes back to the late 1800’s and was moved from downtown to Logan Airport. If a record is broken in Boston, it includes both sets of records for the city regardless of the location they were taken. Interestingly, one of the reasons it’s not as cold in Boston, as it was decades ago, is in part because of the move of the official observations to Logan Airport which is surrounded by water.

This isn’t to criticize the folks at the National Weather Service who do wonderful work, only to point out important semantics about the record. You can see the brief twitter exchange I had earlier today about this.

Mild Air Continues

Although we won’t break any records the next three days it is going to be milder than average with highs into the lower to middle 40s in many locations. As a matter of fact some places over southern York County could nudge 50F on Saturday along with sunny skies. This will make make for a great day to play some winter golf if you can find a course open and get a tee time.

Skiing is still going on across the mountains and while they certainly wanted snow, not rain, for Christmas there were some good bases going into the holiday. It will be cold enough at night to make snow and the resorts will have an opportunity to build back their bases this weekend and especially next week. I don’t see any big snows in the forecast, but this can change quickly this time of year.

New Year’s Eve
The forecast for First Night 2015 looks dry and seasonably cold, it won’t be as comfortable as this weekend walking around at night, but it also won’t be bitter either.