Alaska’s mild winter has made national headlines — again. Two National Weather Service prognosticators from Alaska were quoted in a Thursday Washington Post article about our current warmer-than-usual situation.
One was Brian Brettschneider, who we hear regularly on Alaska News Nightly in the “Ask a Climatologist” segment. The other was Dave Snider.
He explains the delay in wintery weather in Southcentral Alaska.
“Well, we’ve just had very slow-moving weather patterns,” he said. “The general pattern has been one that has kept warm weather locked in over a large part of Alaska for at least about three to four weeks during September when it’s usually starting to cool down and turn wet, during that time we had a strong southerly flow that was persistent for most of the region.”
And while the weather is likely to be warmer and wetter than usual during the deepest part of the winter, Snider says it’s still could be winter-like in bursts.
“Let’s say if you drew a line from Bristol Bay all the way out toward Eagle or Fort Yukon, wetter than average conditions are move likely, with Southcentral to Southeast being a little bit higher than that, 60- to 70-percent wetter than normal,” Snider said. “The thing to remember is that during that period of December , January and February, that while we’re saying ‘warmer and wetter,’ it does mean we can’t get colder and drier periods during that overall trend. You can get a really sharp cold blast for a week, but overall that trend for that three month period would actually be trending warmer.”
The conditions are being affected this year by what Snider says is another el Nino brewing in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
“They’re talking about a 70- to 75-percent chance of an el Nino, which generally means warmer and wetter conditions for us here in Southcentral,” he said. “It means a better chance for kind of a normal higher-elevation snowpack. So good on the tops of the mountains, but down below, maybe a little bit warmer than what we like.”
Snider says the warmer Pacific waters are giving rise to the return of “The Blob,” an area of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Alaska that many in the past have blamed for seabird die-offs and disrupted fishing.
“I haven’t seen number that say it’s actually as strong as the last time we gave it that name. But we’re certainly looking at temperatures on the warmer side of what we would consider average this time of year,” he said.
Southcentral has not been the only spot warmer than usual — conditions in cities such as Nome and Fairbanks are also trailing historical norms, with a lack of snow and hard freezes.
