County gets wind, without flooding

By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
    With winter just a month away, residents of Aroostook County are still experiencing what has been a relatively mild fall. This past weekend, a storm that left many in eastern Maine without power and experiencing moderate flooding merely sprinkled Aroostook County with 1.26 inches in Houlton and 1.13 inches in Caribou. There hasn’t been much snow or severe cold this fall, but what the county has been experiencing in warmth and mild precipitation has occasionally been countered by some serious winds.
    “We’ve been in a warm pattern off and on for the past few weeks,” said Todd Lericos, meteorologist and science operations officer at the National Weather Service in Caribou, “We’ve had a couple of wind events, but only two have really affected northern Maine so far.”
    Lericos explained that we have been essentially under a deep southerly flow from down off the Southeast coast and all that air moving northwards and combining with the cooler air coming down from Canada and made very strong fronts that moved from the Southwest to the Northeast across our area and that is a typical pattern for high wind across northern and southeastern Maine.
    “It actually caused quite a bit of damage in the Down East region each time,” said Lericos, “significant power outages, uprooted trees … things like that.”
    Some parts of Aroostook County did lose power in last weekend’s storm, but northern Maine is usually sheltered from significantly harsh weather.
    “We tend to stay somewhat insulated up here,” said Lericos, “because we’re so far away from the coast and there’s a lot of trees and other things that break up the wind, but we’re not immune and we did experience some damage in a couple of the wind events of this fall.”
    Meteorologists at the weather service are currently analyzing this fall’s erratic winds.     
    “From a meteorological standpoint, it’s unusual how the mechanisms that brought these heavy winds down occurred,” said Lericos. “there seem to have been more wind events this year than last year. There were some very interesting cases meteorologically — how much wind came down and how strong the winds were.”
    The warm and windy weather we’ve been having is not indicative of how this winter will be.
    “Patterns that occur on a week to two-week basis don’t typically have a large effect on the season or how the season will pan out,” said Lericos. The Climate Prediction Center in Washington, D.C. is talking about northern Maine returning to precipitation levels and temperature ranges that are closer to average than last winter.
    Last year’s snowfall of over 200 inches broke the previous snowfall record that was recorded back in 1955.
     “What made it interesting,” stated Lericos, “was that when the snow fell, it stayed.”
    “Most of the snow that fell last year came from Nor’easters, which are very fun to forecast from our perspective despite their high impact on the public. They’re interesting and they keep us on our toes. It’s a different story from coming to work and having it be interesting to going home and having to shovel it,” Lericos added.