Before the impending cold snap, the big weather story was winter’s slow arrival in Maine.
National Weather Service meteorologist Stephen Baron crunched the numbers from a weather monitoring station in Portland. He said the average January temperature was 31.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
“January was actually the warmest January on record at a climate site in Portland,” Baron said. “The previous average warm temperature was 30.4 degrees back in 2002, and we’ve broken that.”
Baron said in the wake of the frigid blast on Friday and Saturday, when temperatures in Portland are forecast to drop to 12 below zero, he expects the thermometer to return to normal or even mild readings.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.