Our Blog: weather

Flooding in York County — is it becoming more common? Roads impassable, bridges washed out, basements full... the stories have become all too familiar in recent years.

The Mother's Day storm in May 2006 seemed an anomaly till the Patriots' Day storm hit in 2007. This March, the Wells Reserve measured 16 inches of rainfall, 5 inches more than Portland's record-setting 11. The roads closed and the sump pumps hummed again.

With the impressive amounts of rain in the last month or so, and some unusually warm temperatures in March and early April, I thought I would share some of the more interesting weather trends we recorded through our System Wide Monitoring Program here at the reserve. March was the wettest and warmest on record for the state of Maine!

Hello again,

Well another strong storm system battered the Maine coast again this past weekend. Here is a brief synopsis of that storm data courtesy of the System Wide Monitoring Program.

All data from 3/13 at 11pm to 3/15 at 3pm was collected on the SWMP Meteorological Station located behind the Coastal Ecology Center.

We had 6.7 inches of rain fall between late Saturday night (13th) into mid afternoon on Monday the 15th. The bulk of the rain (4.7 inches) fell on Sunday the 14th.

We had a max wind gust of 50mph here at the farm. Our average wind speed was 12mph but we had regular gusts between 20-40 mph.

Shaping up to be a wet and windy spring if this keeps up!

Whew! Nothing like some February rain showers huh? It's been a "weird" winter for lack of a more "technical" term.....

Here are some numbers from the most recent "Blast" that occured Thursday Feb 25 through early morning of February 26th 2010. (All data was collected on the SWMP Meteorological Station behind the Maine Coastal Ecology Center.)

York County's worst ice storm in decades knocked out power for 4 days at the Wells Reserve. No significant damage occurred to the Laudholm buildings. Surely some branches and trees fell, but trails are all open and the new fallen snow has already inspired at least one cross-country skier.

Photo by Nancy Viehmann