I feel like we’ve established that, for sure. There’s just nothing good about winter rain.ĬG: Yeah, definitely. Which, you know, I don’t know of anyone that likes rain in the winter. You know, eventually, if things continue to warm, we would transition more of that snow into rain. The core snow months are hanging in there and actually have gotten a little bit snowier. So we start our snow season a little bit later, and we end it a little bit earlier. You know, we’ve managed to hold onto our snow totals over time, although the snow has been squeezed, on average, into fewer days of the year. We’re now used to this this new warmer world, and so if we’re a little cooler than our new normal, that still might be much warmer than it used to be in a typical year.ĬG: Do you think that person would look around at us now, those of us who have complained about this recent snow and the cold, that they would think that we were wimps?īB: The snow is trickier. So we do need to keep that in mind, that there is this temporal perspective. Well, if this person had been frozen in ice, you know, 100 years ago, and we replaced that winter 100 years ago with this winter, what we would think of as being cold, they would think of as, “Whoa, that was a pretty mild winter,” just because it used to be a lot colder back then. What would you think was going to happen with the winter?īB: So let’s say, for example, this winter ends up being - and I’m just going to make this number up - 2 degrees colder than normal. And kind of what we call equal chances, so no signal for either above or below for, you know, the the other 50% of the state in between Southeast and Northwest.Ĭasey Grove: You mentioned the trend, and just riffing off of, you know, “If you woke up from a coma,” what if you had been frozen in ice, you know, hundreds of years ago, and you woke up? You just thawed out. Above normal temperatures are favored on the west coast and North Slope, and that’s driven largely by the trends, recent trends, and sea ice. And if you look at the winter outlook this year, it shows colder than normal temperature, or below normal, is favored in Southeast Alaska. So those are the three things that go into our winter outlook. You know, if you just woke up from a coma, and someone said, “What do you think it’ll be? What do we think the winter will be like? You should probably say, “I don’t know, but it’s probably going to be warmer than winter used to be,” just because things are warmer now. And when that water is open with no ice on it, there’s a lot of heat that can be liberated into the atmosphere, and it keeps things warm. And it’s kind of getting a late start right now. Another important factor is the evolution of sea ice in the Chukchi Sea and then the the Bering Sea. So that represents about 40% of the variability. And more times than not, La Niña winters are colder than average in Alaska. But the largest contributor to the seasonal forecast is La Niña. We don’t know where the jet stream is going to be, and what the trajectory of sea ice is going to be, and so on. There’s always going to be uncertainty on what happens on relatively short timescales. So NOAA just came out with their seasonal outlooks, and they look at a couple of things. And it turned out to be, especially in the southern mainland, you know, like a top 10 warmest winter. And the thinking was, you know, this is a real harbinger for: It’s going to be just a brutally cold winter. It’s safe to say we’re seeing some of that already this winter, but whether the wintry weather remains is a question people like National Weather Service climate researcher Brian Brettschneider are pondering.īrettschneider - back for our Ask a Climatologist segment - points to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s long-term forecast for a third La Niña winter in a row, but he says we can’t draw too many conclusions from the winter we’ve seen so far.īrian Brettschneider: So for example, last winter, November was the coldest month of the winter for many locations in the southwestern, say, quarter of the state. (Casey Grove/Alaska Public Media)įor a lot of Alaskans, it’s a season that’s not entirely defined by a specific period on the calendar as much as, you know it when you see it. A dog runs on frozen, snow-covered Goose Lake in Anchorage on Sunday, Nov.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |