Daily high and low temps, and snow fall for Winter 2013-14, recorded in Gray

February 19th felt like a tipping point.

“I’m still not shoveled out from yesterday’s storm,” an Auburn woman shrieked, as much as one can shriek on Facebook. “Ugh. Enough, already!”

Outside there were 10 inches of fresh snow. It had fallen overnight, wet and heavy, on top of the full foot of snow that had come just days before. Twenty-two more inches of the stuff and February was only half over. And while you were out there shoveling it, you shivered in 15-degree cold while a brisk wind made it feel downright arctic. Cries of “enough!” came from all over and who could blame us? Our fingers were frozen, our backs ached and we spent three hours a day scraping our windshields.

And that was just February, which turned into March without notice. Miserable, relentless winter! Who could have foreseen such a thing?

“For 2013-2014, we are forecasting a winter that will experience below average temperatures for about two-thirds of the nation. A large area of below-normal temperatures will predominate from roughly east of the Continental Divide to the Appalachians, north and east through New England . . . copious rains and/or snows . . . significant snowfalls . . . particularly volatile and especially turbulent.”

The Farmers’ Almanac, that’s who. It predicted, months in advance, the winter that was to be.

Not that they’re bragging about it.

“My friends would tell you that I am not one to say ‘I told you so,'” says Lewiston-based almanac publisher Peter Geiger. “But, if I did, it would be about how my Farmers’ Almanac predicted this winter. Starting with our release last August, I called the Super Bowl game, and our descriptors like ‘bitter, piercing, biting cold and snowy’ describing most of the country. I am told that doing this two years in advance is not possible. We’ve been doing it over and over again for almost 200 years.”

It’s hard to argue. When you read the almanac forecast, prepared long before the start of winter, it sounds quite a lot like the seasonal wrap-up from the National Weather Service – which was produced at the end of it when all the facts were in hand.

“The meteorological winter of 2013-14 was much colder and snowier than normal,” goes the NWS winter summary. “All three winter months had below normal temperatures. As a result, the season was 3.3 degrees below normal.”

Exactly as the almanac predicted. Just wait until you hear what they forecast for the coming months.

But let’s rest and warm up a bit before we get to that.

Winter for geeks

There are stats, tons and tons of stats, and all of them grim. But if you don’t have the head for numbers right now – how can you count on your fingers and toes when they’re frozen blocks of pink flesh? – you need only listen to the visceral reactions of the people who survived it to get an idea of what Winter 2014 was like.

“Financially,” said Keith Pray, of Lewiston, “it was the hardest winter in a long time.”

True that. The stats bear it out.

There were 13 days with lows of zero or colder this meteorological winter, which is twice what is normally expected, according to the NWS. The 30-year normal is 6.4 days of zero or colder.

In Gray, -11 degrees on Jan. 4 was the coldest of the season. This fell four degrees short of the all-time low in the region of -15 on Jan. 15, 2004. That -11 on Jan. 4 was the 5th all-time coldest temp ever at the Gray Weather Service Forecast Office.

Are you into degree days, those confusing numbers used to determine the heating requirements of buildings? Over the last 30 years, the seasonal degree days average has been 3,661. By mid-March, we were at 3,939, a whopping 278 degree days above normal, which means more oil – or wood or pellets or shivering – than usual to keep warm.

“Living in the country, I am sure glad I have a wood stove,” said Betsy Way of Hartford. “This winter has been a real challenge for heating. Getting the wood is heavy duty, but a wood stove gives out such cozy warmth. It’s the kind of heat that really gets into your bones.”

The winter of 2014 was inescapable. If you weren’t shoveling, you were shivering. If you went somewhere warm and tried to ignore it, the media was there to remind you. TV weather crews and newspapers alike presented fancy graphs and sidebar stories to inform you that more snow was coming. More cold, too. And maybe some sleet. Better order more oil. Better gas up the snowblower. And by the way, doesn’t your throat feel kind of sore? You might be coming down with the flu. Here’s a handy chart with which to better gauge your misery.

Dang media.

“What I think is happening here is a mass local media-induced psychosis,” wrote Robert Martin of Peru, in what may be my favorite rant ever. “I mean come on. It is Maine here, the third coldest state in the nation. Certain local morning media personalities . . . have been whining about winter since the daytime temps fell below 72 degrees. Someone give these chicks a snowmobile ride or hand ’em a pair of skis, for Christ’s sake!

“This ain’t Florida, folks,” the rant continues. You can almost feel the spittle. “It’s Maine, where we ice fish, ski, snowmobile, dogsled, snowshoe, truck race, ice climb, go sliding, blow doughnuts on the ice with our four-wheelers (even with plows on them), jump off our freshly shoveled roofs, ice sculpt with chain saws, plow out complete stangers’ yards just for the fun of plowing, even ride in one-horse open sleighs! Winter rocks! Who the heck is deluded enough to live in the third coldest state and expect to sunbathe in January?”

Seasonal affective disorder is for weenies

Martin is not alone in his wintertime joie de vivre. “I love winter,” says Julia Reuter, of Bethel. “Grew up in western Massachusetts and started alpine skiing with my best friend’s family in 5th grade – never could get enough snow. . . . Been in Maine pretty much since college and can’t get enough snow – yeah, it’s been cold – maybe a tad too cold (feel for those who have a hard time paying for heating fuel), but it’s wicked easy to wax your skis when it stays below 32 degrees. Count me happy this winter!”

See what I mean? Sick!

“After being gone for 51 years,” writes Neal Van Lieu, “I bought a house here in Milton Township last November and it was quite the welcome back from Mrs. Nature for myself and my Californian wife. Love it!”

“My hubby just retired from the Army after 22 years of service,” says Abby Catanese. “Our last duty station was Fort Bliss, Texas. Returning to Maine, we hoped winter would be a doozy. Well, it was.”

Then there are those in the It Could Always Be Worse camp.

“We keep asking ourselves, why do we live in Maine?” says Marie Lavallee Pike of Lewiston. “It was a bad winter for cold, ice and snow. Well, my sister lives in upstate New York, near a Great Lake, and they have it way worse than we do. They can have white-out snow events over and over and over. They call it lake-effect snow. One of their storms can last three or more days.”

In some ways, Pike is correct. There were many storms over the course of the winter of 2014 when lower New England states – and even deeper south – got more snow than we did. Can I get a hallelujah? But while it’s fun to engage in Snowfall Schadenfreude when that happens, the fact is the people in those lower states experienced temperatures 20 degrees warmer than ours while they were shoveling out. Not to mention the fact that winter came later and will be done sooner than up here in the tundra.

Cover your mouth when you cough

And sickness. Although the Centers for Disease Control’s charts and graphs (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/) will make you go blind in one eye, they do indicate that cases of cold and flu spiked at the start of the year, just as winter was really starting to grind. There was pneumonia, there was influenza, there were those sore throats and ugly coughs that everyone seemed to suffer by the middle of February.

But the CDC shows no particular rise in cold and flu for the winter of 2103-14. By all accounts, it was just a typical winter, with the sneezing, aching and dripping that’s to be expected in any Maine winter.

Similarly, while the Weather Service stats show more cold and more snow than usual, it was not a record-breaking winter by most standards. It just felt that way because it started early and all signs point to it staying as long as it can. Zero degrees predicted by the NWS for Monday night? What the???

Or maybe we’re just a bunch of wusses. Maybe we’re focusing on the hardships instead of the joys.

“This has been a great year for the Maine winter sports industry,” our friend Robert R. Martin reiterates, “despite the endless whinings of certain local media personalities (probably from away) who shall remain nameless. They’re dragging the rest of us down to their pathetic lack of winter heartiness and resourcefulness. . . . You gotta laugh at all the anti-winter rhetoric out there – it’s pathetic.”

What do you know? I’ve grown to hate him.

A year of extremes

As of this writing, it’s 36 degrees outside, which is cause for celebration. When you’ve spent three months suffering in mostly single-digit temperatures, anything above freezing feels like beach weather. Next week? Temperatures are expected to drop back into the 20s. There’s a strong possibility of further snow, perhaps into April, as the Farmers’ Almanac sadly predicts.

The rest of its forecast isn’t so hot, either.

“Spring will be wet for most of the country. An East Coast storm in mid-April could bring a very late-season snowfall to high-terrain areas of New England. . . . Initially, warm weather will be slow to establish itself, but by July, summer heat will have arrived in full force across much of the nation.”

You doubt the Farmers’ Almanac at your own peril, we’ve discovered. Just don’t blame the messenger – the almanac doesn’t create the weather, it just predicts it. As far as we know. And they don’t brag.

Not very much, anyway.

“If we get snow in April,” Geiger says, “I might be forced to say ‘I told you so’ even though it is unlike me. Little more winter to come, but rest assured that this summer will be oppressively humid, wet and thundery. This is a year of extremes.”

It wasn’t your imagination; it was colder than normal

• All three winter months had below normal temperatures. As a result, the season’s averave of 21 was 3.3 degrees below normal.
• There were 13 days with lows of 0 or colder, with is twice what is expected. The 30-year normal is 6.4 days of 0 or colder. (From Dec. 1)
• December was the coldest in Gray in the 19 years sicne the National Weather Service began keeping records there.
• In Portland, the average winter temperature of 22.6 was the 22nd coldest in the past 74 years. The coldest winter was in 1970-17, when the three-month average temperature was 17.9.

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