Portland, ME weather
Right now 68°, clear · today 63° / 43°, rain · seven days from the National Weather Service
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Right now · 68° · clear · wind W 13 mph · 7° warmer than this time yesterday · at Portland Jetport, 1:35 PM
Today, in the Weather Service’s words
A slight chance of rain showers before 1pm. Sunny, with a high near 63. West wind 15 to 20 mph, with gusts as high as 35 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. New rainfall amounts less than a tenth of an inch possible.
Seven days
Winter in Portland
Portland averages 69 inches of snow a year, according to NOAA’s 1991-2020 climate normals - a heavy snow place. Serious winters and the equipment to match. It takes a genuinely big storm to close school.
That is why local snowfall thresholds differ so much from one town to the next: a district that plans for 69 inches a year is equipped differently from one that never sees any. Here, roughly 8 inches in a single storm is where a normal school day comes under threat.
Upper air over Portland
The nearest radiosonde launch is Gray, about 16 miles away. A weather balloon goes up twice a day and measures temperature, humidity and wind all the way through the atmosphere - which is what forecasters actually read to judge whether storms will fire, and how a surface forecast was arrived at.
Forecasters covering the Northeast
Sources: National Weather Service forecast and hourly grid for Portland (api.weather.gov), updated Mon, 1:11 PM UTC. Sunrise and sunset from NOAA’s solar position calculations. Snowfall normals from NOAA’s 1991-2020 US Climate Normals. County lines from the US Census Bureau.