
A Christmas tree in a dory moored in the Kennebunk River is coated with snow and ice on Dec. 10 after a wintry mix fell the night before. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald
An update, with early snowfall totals, was posted at 10 a.m. Dec. 24. Read it here: Snowfall totals in Maine range from a dusting to 5 inches Tuesday morning
Portland and elsewhere in Maine will have a white Christmas, but just barely.
Snow is likely after 3 a.m. Tuesday, with 1 to 2 inches possible, according to the National Weather Service. Another inch is possible before 2 p.m., when clouds will give way to sunshine. The temperature should reach about 31 degrees, just shy of freezing, making the day-old snow a little grayer and slushier.
The snow will be enough for the holiday to qualify as a white Christmas, the annually hoped-for weather event celebrated as an ode to the holiday by composer Irving Berlin early in World War II.
“It should stick around,” said Michael Clair, a meteorologist at the weather service office in Gray. “It’s cutting it a little close, but there’s a pretty good chance.”
Conditions won’t differ much in Lewiston and Waterville, he said.
The maximum Christmas snowfall in Portland was 12.5 inches in 2002, according to The Washington Post. But 1970 was the year the city had the most snow on the ground on the holiday, with 39 inches logged.
In Waterville, less than 90 minutes north of Portland, the maximum snow depth on Christmas Day was nearly a foot less, at 29 inches, in 1970. Snowfall hit a maximum there at 6 inches in 1978. And in Lewiston, the maximum Christmas snowfall also was in 1978, when 10.3 inches fell. The maximum snow depth was 19 inches in 1995.
Residents of Presque Isle have celebrated 97% of Christmases with snow on the ground since 1940, according to the Post. In Portland, it’s been 67%.
Maine still gets some snowy Decembers and white Christmases, but they are becoming less common and less predictable, data show. Climate Central, a Princeton, New Jersey-based group that analyzes and reports on climate science, says residents of the Portland area have a 48% chance of seeing a white Christmas this year. Those odds rise to 83% in Presque Isle.
Climate change is transforming winter into the fastest-warming season in the U.S., with average temperatures in New England up 5 degrees since 1970, Elizabeth Burakowski, an assistant research professor at the Institute for the Earth Systems Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said at the start of last year’s wet but not very snowy winter.
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