Climate of Alaska Review

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Climate of Alaska ReviewIf you like gardening, you might scratch Barrow off your list of places to live. Alaska's farthest north town experiences about 10 frost-free days each year. Also, you would have trouble watering your plants there, especially in 1934, when an Alaska-record low 1.4 inches of precipitation fell. All year.
In stark contrast, your broccoli would have needed an umbrella in Angoon on an October day in 1982, when 15 inches of rain fell. And you probably needed more than a shovel if you were driving through Thompson Pass at the end of December in 1955, when more than five feet of snow fell in one day.
On the bright side for Barrow, its citizens are gaining 15 minutes of sunlight every day right now, in early February, while Annette in Southeast Alaska gains just four minutes per day. And Barrow is also a great place to fly a kite; the town experiences calm conditions just 1 percent of the time.
I know these things because I own a copy of "The Climate of Alaska," by Martha Shulski and Gerd Wendler, two climatologists who work for the Alaska Climate Research Center. The University of Alaska Press just published their new book, which is packed with cool facts about Alaska for weather nerds like me and anyone else who wants to learn more about this "large peninsula" we call home.
Shulski and Wendler have gathered all the reliable weather records--most of which are younger than a century old in Alaska--and have written about trends and oddities, like the fact that the farthest north tornado swept through the village of Kiana in August, 1976.
The Climate of Alaska exposes the extremes of Alaska, including the facts that it didn't snow or rain in Gulkana for two months straight in 1950, and in 1999 it didn't stop raining for 49 consecutive days in Juneau. Gah.
As the Juneau example illustrates, the book gives you a decent feeling of what it might be like to live in different areas of the state. People in Anchorage, for example, can see 39 miles on an average day. Fairbanks has a daily average of 35 miles visibility, but it might be tough to be a Cessna pilot in St. Paul, where the average visibility is six miles.
The state capitol of bluebird sunny days is Kotzebue, which features an average of 100 days each year with clear skies. If you're into clouds, Cold Bay would be the place, with an average of just 13 clear days each year. That includes an average of zero clear days in June, July, August, and September.
If you get the chills thinking about Cold Bay, Southeast's Annette is the state's warmest town, based on its yearly average of about 46 degrees F (which is due to its stable, maritime climate. If you really want heat, the town with the warmest average high temperature in July is Fairbanks, at 73). The coldest town with long-term weather records is Barrow, with an average yearly temp of 10.4.
We all hear that Alaska's climate is changing, and no one can tally that up with more certainty than a couple climatologists. Shulski and Wendler found that from 1949 to 2005, the state warmed 6.3 degrees in winter, 4 degrees in spring, 2.3 degrees in summer, and just 0.9 degrees in autumn. Every major town and city in Alaska with a dependable weather record for that half century got warmer during every season, except Bethel, Delta, and Fairbanks, which cooled ever so slightly in the fall.
This book is a great reference for an Alaska writer like me, and now sits within reach of my desk. Climatology is a young science in Alaska, and I trust this book.Climate of Alaska OverviewThose of us in the lower forty-eight states tend to think of Alaska as an unremitting wasteland of frigid temperatures, ice, and snow. But in reality, because of its immense size and its position at the edge of the Arctic, Alaska has a remarkably varied and complex climate.

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