BANGOR, Maine — They say there are two kinds of people in Maine: those who complain about the cold and those who complain about the people who complain about the cold.
But there’s actually a third kind: the meteorologists who celebrate record-setting temperatures. And for Corey Bogel, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Caribou, February was one worthy of the record books.
“We are going to be #1!” he tweeted Saturday morning, announcing that February was the all-time coldest month on record for Bangor.
That’s a chilly 6.1 degrees, according to preliminary monthly climate data, nearly 15 degrees below normal.
That’s well below the previous record of 8.4 degrees set in January 1994. In case you’re wondering, the NWS records for Bangor go back to 1926, so it’s possible there was a colder month that’s not on record.
In perhaps a fitting end to the coldest month on record, Saturday’s low was also a record. At minus 16 degrees, it broke the daily temperature set in 1934. It also came in below the 7 degree temperature recorded in Barrow, Alaska.
Meanwhile, the weather service reports record snowfall this winter as well. So far, the weather service reports, 117.1 inches of snow has fallen on Bangor. As of Saturday, that was more than twice the 50.2 inches that normally fall by the end of February.
It also exceeds the 115.1 inches that fell in the winter of 2010-11, the highest snowfall in the past seven winters preceding this year’s snowfall.
Bogel blames the record temperatures and snowfall on a persistent weather pattern that has a ridge of warm, high pressure air in the western United States and a trough of low pressure across the eastern United States.
“It’s just been a very persistent pattern all month,” he said.
Looking to March, the weather service says temperatures look to remain below average, but Bogel said they’ll be “significantly warmer” than February.
Follow Evan Belanger on Twitter at @evanbelanger.