Colder weather to follow brief ‘balmy’ spell

The National Weather Service canceled a wind-chill advisory Sunday as Mainers looked forward to a warm-up over the next day or two. But another blast of even colder air is on tap for later this week.

The temperature dipped to 29 below in Allagash, 17 below in Livermore Falls and 7 below in Portland early Sunday before warming up with temperatures in the teens in southern Maine.

“Today, people think it feels balmy,” Susan DuPlessis, spokeswoman for the Sunday River ski resort, said Sunday. Twenty-four hours earlier, the temperature dipped to 10 below on the summit.

By Monday, the mercury was expected to inch upward into the 20s, and it will approach the low 30s on Tuesday in southern Maine.

After that, the state will sink back into the deep freeze.

“We’re getting another shot of cold air straight out of Siberia,” said Duane Wolfe of the National Weather Service in Caribou.

Most Mainers, even skiers, chose to sit out the cold weather at home or some other warm place.

DuPlessis said business was down during the cold snap even though skiing conditions were the best this season. Most other ski areas also reported that their numbers were down.

Elsewhere around New England, the thermometer was even more sluggish as temperatures dropped well below zero Saturday across the Northeast, making it the coldest day in a decade for some cities and keeping all but the hardiest people indoors.

St. Johnsbury, Vt., led the list of records Saturday with a low of 27 below zero, the National Weather Service said. Unofficially, Saranac Lake, N.Y., reported 34 below.

At midday, temperatures in central Maine ranged through single digits above and below zero under blue and sunny skies.

Inside the relatively warm Kennebec Ice Arena in Hallowell, Ron Pelletier shrugged off the cold outside.

“This is nothing out of the ordinary for us. Come on,” said Pelletier, a high school teacher from Greenville who had driven two hours south for a pee-wee hockey tryout his son was participating in.

“You get a few cold snaps during the winter. This is our first one,” he said.

Pelletier acknowledged that the deep freeze was the genuine article. Two days earlier, he noted, a ski meet had been canceled because of extreme cold.

The coldest morning readings were in northern Maine, according to the National Weather Service, with Allagash reporting 29 below.

Boston’s Logan International Airport recorded a low of 3 below zero, two degrees chillier than the previous record for Jan. 10, set in 1875. It was the city’s coldest day since Jan. 16, 1994, when thermometers registered 4 below.

As he stood on a street corner Saturday, Jim Konda said that since moving from Alabama 20 years ago, he has “learned about layers.”

Jeff Davis, 24, hurrying to work Saturday in downtown Boston, longed for San Diego. That city’s forecast high Saturday: 69 degrees.

Record numbers of motorists – about 1,000 an hour in eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island- called the American Automobile Association of Southern New England to jump-start their dead car batteries Saturday morning, said spokesman Art Kinsman.

Other record lows included 19 below zero at Montpelier, Vt.; 16 below at Syracuse, N.Y.; 7 below at Scranton, Pa.; and 2 below at Bridgeport, Conn., according to the National Weather Service.

“It’s cold – what people in New Hampshire told me I should call ‘crisp,'” Democrat presidential hopeful Wesley Clark joked Saturday morning in Milford, N.H., where the temperature was 6 below zero.

“When we had weather that’s even somewhat similar to this down in Arkansas, we always took a holiday,” Clark said. “We closed things down and went sledding.”

Rochester, N.Y., had its coldest morning since Jan. 16, 1994, with a record 12 below zero. New York City’s LaGuardia and Kennedy airports also set records for the day, but only at 2 degrees above zero.

The Web site for the Mount Washington Observatory reported a low of 29 below atop New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, elevation 6,288 feet, an improvement from the reading of 38 below posted late Friday.