Background: In 1844 Lydia Maria Child, of Medford Massachusetts, wrote the classic Thanksgiving poem “Over the river and through the woods”. In the poem she wrote about “white and drifting snow”. November is typically the wettest month of the year here in Maine—and it is predicted to get wetter. But, has snow always contributed the same amount to that wetness? Will we see a lot of our November precipitation this year as snow, or as rain?

The graph shows Snowfall (in inches) on the left-hand axis and Total precipitation (in inches) on the right-hand axis. Snowfall is the total of all the snowfalls for the month—measured as snow on the ground—whether light and fluffy or heavy and dense. Total precipitation is all of the rain, snow, sleet, and hail for the month—and for this measurement the snow, sleet, and hail would have been melted, recorded as inches of water, and then added to the inches of rain for total precipitation. The data are for Novembers in Portland, Maine from 1871 to 2010.

Data Source: