With a little luck, Maine could see a gentle spring.

Since 2004 began, New England has been very dry. Little snow remains on the ground, which bodes well for farmers looking to start their spring work, as well as for those who live in flood plains.

But this winter was the epitome of the wildly changeable winters Maine is known for, state climatologist Greg Zielinski said this week.

As of midnight Monday, Bangor had received 57.2 inches of snow, 2.6 inches below normal, for the time span from July 1, 2003, to June 30. Caribou had received 98.6 inches of snow, just 1.9 inches below normal. In Bangor, about 26 inches of the total fell in December. In Caribou, December snowfall was 43 inches. However, a peculiar midwinter thaw melted everything that fell before the new year.

“We had a couple of big storms in December. Everyone was kind of excited, then it got really warm,” said Hendricus Lulofs, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Caribou.

“[Since January] it’s been an inch or 2 here, an inch or 2 there type of winter,” he said.

But if December was warm, with a green Christmas ushering in 50-degree temperatures, the new year more than made up for the heat. In Bangor, this January was the fourth-coldest on record, with an average temperature of 10 degrees and wind chills in excess of 40 below zero.

“People think that cold weather means snow, but when it’s that cold, it can’t snow,” said Zielinski, who is based at the University of Maine.

Despite the calendar’s assertion that spring came last weekend, Maine still has a good chance of getting more snow. Traditionally, northern Maine sees more than 8 inches in April, while Bangor averages 4 inches. An average Maine spring is a cycle of warm spells alternating with wet snow that makes for slushy streets through most of April, Lulofs said.

“You have the battleground of the warm air to our south and the winter hanging on to our north,” he said.

Many rivers and lakes in northern Maine are still topped with 20 to 30 inches of ice, typical for this time of year. What’s unusual is the fact that ice dams formed during the midwinter thaw, then froze in place. When those ice dams begin to break up, they could exacerbate seasonal ice-flood problems on some rivers, Lulofs said.

Whether riverside communities see ice jams and flooding will depend on Maine’s rainfall over the next month, he said.

Long-term climate predictions aren’t much help, as the chances of high, low or average rainfall and precipitation are about equal for New England between now and June.

But with the state hovering just at normal groundwater and lake and stream levels, a few inches of warm rain before the trees start budding and using up large amounts of groundwater would be the best insurance to keep Maine from slipping back into drought conditions, climate experts said.

“We would like to have seen the snow on the ground thicker at this time of the year to recharge the lakes, streams and groundwater,” Lulofs said. “But if we have precipitation near normal in the spring, we’ll be all set.”

Last fall’s heavy rain and the midwinter snowmelt put Maine in a good position, but an abnormally dry spring could cause problems, Zielinski said.

A map maintained by the National Drought Mitigation Center using nationwide climate data hasn’t shown drought in Maine since last fall. However, for the first week of March, the monitor showed a small patch of abnormally dry conditions spreading across New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the very southern tip of York County. That dry patch could be of concern both for agriculture and for longer-term groundwater conditions.

Maine certainly is not in a drought at the moment, but wary scientists are watching rainfall and stream flow data just in case.

“One of the problems with drought is that it’s not an on-and-off switch,” Zielinski said.