Alaska News

Alaska's summer weather: very hot, very cold, very wet

Just when an unseasonably mild fall in Alaska's largest city has many thinking "global warming,'' the National Weather Service is out with a summer summary that paints a far more complex climate picture statewide.

The summer of 2014 was the coldest, wettest and warmest on record, the agency reports. Which version you witnessed depends on where you live. The report illustrates the size and variety of Alaska weather and terrain.

Generally, the Alaska Weather and Climate Highlights, June 2014-September 2014, paint a picture of a state that experienced three zones of weather.

There was a band of significantly warmer-than-normal air that cut along the outer coast of Southeast Alaska, jumped across the Gulf of Alaska to cross the middle of the Kenai Peninsula and then generally followed the coastline north to Kotzebue. Behind the warm front, things were near normal except for a big blob of cold air in the center of the state and on the tip of the Arctic coast.

Hot times, frigid times

On the hot edge, Homer saw its warmest summer on record. The temperature averaged 58 degrees, topping the 2004 and 2005 high of 57.8.

The story was similar near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula at Cold Bay, where the average temperature of 54.1 buried a 52.4 record dating back to 1977. To the north, Kotzebue saw the third warmest summer on record.

Behind this band of warm air, though, things weren't nearly so nice, especially on the northernmost Arctic coast and in a curving band of the Interior where a little ice age looked to be forming.

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Glennallen experienced freezing conditions at least once every month of summer, the weather service reported. It was the first time in the last 16 years that June, July and August had all seen the thermometer dip to 32 or colder.

On the Arctic coast, Barrow never got warmer than a not-so-warm 58 degrees, the lowest summer high on record there.

Meanwhile, Fairbanks -- the heart of the Interior -- barely dodged the region's pocket of cold air, which ended just to the west. That's probably a good thing or the city might have seen summer snows, given that rain seemed to fall just about every day.

"Wettest summer on record with 11.63 inches of rain,'' reported the weather service, which noted the Chena River celebrated the Independence Day holiday by reaching its highest level in 20 years on July 5.

Just to the south, Denali National Park and Preserve was getting what the weather agency described as sometimes torrential rains. They caused localized flooding and, up high, big snows.

The dismal 36 percent success rate among climbers on Mount McKinley, North America's tallest mountain, probably had a lot to do with the weather. It's hard to climb when you're shoveling snow off your tent to keep from being buried alive.

More than 5 feet of rain

But compared to other parts of Alaska, all of that precipitation was but a drop in the proverbial bucket. The rain in Main, as in Prince William Sound's Main Bay, was something to behold, according to the weather service.

Sixty-five inches fell there this summer, near twice what's normal. That's about 5 1/2 feet of rain, or an average of about half an inch of rain per day every day all summer.

The Panhandle was similarly soaked. The 24.18 inches of rain in Juneau gave the capital city the chance to claim its wettest summer ever, and notoriously rainy Ketchikan set a daily record for June when it got 5.46 inches of rain in one day. (Not letting up, Ketchikan recorded 5.7 inches of rain on Saturday and another 3.7 inches Sunday; by comparison, Anchorage, which saw 11 straight days of rain earlier in September, got just over 4 inches for the entire month.)

Warm, wet start to winter

The good news, or bad news, depending on how one looks at it, could be that more is on the way. The weather service believes an El Nino -- which usually brings warmer, wetter conditions to coastal Alaska -- is getting ready to swarm out of the southern Pacific Ocean.

It's predicted to peak in early winter and hang around into 2015. The national climate prediction center is calling for warmer -- sometimes significantly warmer -- and wetter conditions for October, November and December.

The January, February, March model predicts temperatures trending back toward seasonal normals for Alaska, but still wetter than normal. The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in March could benefit.

Mushers are still complaining about the no-snow trail this year that left them bashed and battered. But who really knows what could happen come March.

It's the weather, and in a land as dynamic as Alaska nobody ever really knows what it is going to do months in the future.

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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