A Wiseman cabin bunkered with firewood covered with snow to provide extra insulation/Jack Reakoff photo
At 1 p.m. on the day after Christmas, the temperature on the digital thermometer at Jack Reakoff’s home 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Wiseman, AK, read 50.1-degrees-below zero.
By then, Reakoff had spent days watching the numbers click backward on the face of the electronic thermometer of the 21st Century in the same way the old-timers once watched mercury plummet in a glass thermometer. Wiseman was in those days a small mining community destined to become famous in conservationist Bob Marshall’s iconic “Arctic Village.” an account of life on the edge of the wilderness so successful it is still available in print today.
Marshall was in Wiseman in the early 1930s when Alaska was cold. It has warmed since but was witnessing a taste of the old on Thursday.
“Global warming just had a reset,” Reakoff messaged. “The wind blew for a week at 5 to 10 mph with temperatures from minus-25 to minus-40 – windchill to minus-45 to minus-60. The last three hours the wind stopped and it is cooling down steady. This (minus 50.1) is current on the National Weather Service thermometer I take readings with.”
A long-time resident of the Brooks Range, Reakoff knows how dangerous these sorts of temperatures.
“At such temperatures one must keep going,” Stuck wrote. “No amount of clothing that it is possible to wear on the trail will keep one warm while standing still. For dogs and men alike, constant brisk motion is necessary; for dogs as well as men—even though dogs will sleep outdoors in such cold without harm—for they cannot take as good care of themselves in the harness as they can when loose. A trace that needs mending, a broken buckle, a snow-shoe string that must be replaced, may chill one so that it is impossible to recover one’s warmth again. The bare hand cannot be exposed for many seconds without beginning to freeze; it is dangerous to breathe the air into the lungs for any length of time without a muffler over the mouth.”
About a decade before Stuck’s book was published, esteemed American author Jack London had penned “To Build a Fire,” a short story that was to become one of his most famous tales about life in the north. It focused on a man who ignored the warnings against traveling along on the trail in extreme cold and froze to death.
With the return of such temperatures, the National Weather Service (NWS) was cautioning rural Alaskans to travel with care and seek shelter where necessary.
Oops
Even before those cold weather warnings and advisories directed at Alaskans, Judah Cohen at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) was posting an apology for not seeing this coming.
The foremost authority on the polar vortex – the swirl of air around the North Pole that exerts a significant amount of control over Northern Hemisphere weather – Cohen had expected Alaska weather to stay generally warm under the influence of an oscillating pattern of upper-atmosphere wind that pulls warm air north from the central Pacific Ocean and pushes it over Alaska into the Arctic where it chills before rippling south and east through the middle of the North American continent.
It is now looking like that pattern – which has become something of a new normal in Alaska winters of late – has changed.
The mid-latitudes are obviously of more interest to international weather forecasters because they are home to much of the northern hemisphere population. It’s invariably big news when the polar vortex spins an Arctic chill into the Midwest or onto the Atlantic seaboard.
Most Alaskans are also now aware that the oscillation of the vortex that causes that Lower 48 cooling pulls that warm air north out of the central Pacific Ocean into the 49th state.
The good news (for Alaskans who hate climate change)/bad news (for Alaskans who like mild winters) is that the current pattern might now linger for a while.
Jack Reakoff’s digital thermometer
More to come?
“The biggest challenge that I see right now is the center of low, mid-tropospheric (pressure) heights is currently just north of Alaska and is expected to expand in breadth over the next two weeks – enough so to fill the entire Arctic basin,” Cohen wrote. “This is a fairly classic pattern of low heights in the Arctic and high heights in the mid-latitudes resulting in a cold Arctic/warm continents pattern, all consistent with a positive Arctic oscillation.
“It seems a bit ironic (at least to me) that with the record low sea ice in the Chukchi-Bering seas this fall, the incredibly warm year Alaska just experienced both in part due to persistent ridging in the region, this same region is predicted to now experience an extended period of low heights and below normal temperatures.”
Can you say “brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”?
“As an aside, this is something that I had a hard time anticipating even just a few weeks ago,” Cohen admitted. “Another example where it is easy to become overconfident in outcomes based on recent trends. By itself this is not necessarily a threat to the veracity of the forecast but coupled with a strong stratospheric PV this pattern could become persistent and even dominate the winter….”
A Gulf of Alaska still filled with unusually warm water could help moderate the cold a bit for Southcoastal Alaska, but the weather service is now forecasting temperatures that recent residents of the Anchorage Metro areas might think unusual. Parts of the state’s largest city could hit 10 below on Friday night.
North of the Alaska Range, which arcs through the state to split it north to south before meeting the Aleutian Range to split it east to west, it was already bitterly cold on Thursday – 44-degrees-below zero at Galena on the Yukon River, 38-degrees-below-zero at McGrath on the upper Kuskokwim River, a comparatively warm minus-15 in Fairbanks but with the temperature falling toward a forecast 29-degrees-below-zero overnight with the Friday high predicted to stay “near -29.”
The story below went on to report that “the statewide average temperature for Alaska in 2019 is on pace to break a record set just three years earlier. That is, if a cold snap doesn’t change things.
“But according to University of Alaska Fairbanks climatologist Brian Brettschneider, even with temperatures dipping for much of the state, it’s looking like 2019 will still go down as the warmest calendar year ever in Alaska.”
Given a record warm summer, Alaska still might set a new annual high, but even if it doesn’t, it will join the long run of warmer years primarily driven by milder winters. Nine of the state’s 10 warmest years since 1900 have come in the last 39 years.
This seasonal pendulum of weather is not expected to swing back the temperatures of old in these times of general global warming, but even within the range of normal in a warmer world, deadly cold winters can be expected to continue in Alaska for decades and decades into the future.
Reakoff said the weather impressed some Chinese tourists visiting Wiseman. Fortunately, they were being guided, given that minus-50 weather must be taken seriously. In extreme cold and/or wind chill, “frostbite can occur quickly and even hypothermia or death if precautions are not taken,” the NWS warns.
Categories: News
40 degrees and RAINING again in Anchorage this morning…
But what does the world’s foremost climate expert have to say? Greta Thunberg, why is it so cold in Alaska!? It is so cold in Alaska that the children can not go out and play! If the cold is keeping children from playing, then their childhoods are being stolen! Greta, please … do something!!
“How dare you”!!!!!!
Greta got her start, bribing students with skip-days. Hold those events after school, or on weekends! (And see what kind of attendance you get…)
Worse … she’s a pawn. There are visionary 16 yos, with maturing beyond their years. She isn’t one of them … she’s a prop for stage-management parents & associates.
Yeah, really & actually. The grownups aren’t there to ‘help’ her … she’s helpless without them, and everything we see is them, not her.
Is she passionate? Sure … so is an infant squalling for a bottle, or just to hear its echo off the walls.
Greenland may become ours, because it was stage-managed by Denmark … the EU, UN, and eco-enviro NGOs. Similarly, the boomerang-effect could come into play with Greta Thuneberg.
Honestly Steve Stine, you still believe all this money grubbing fraud? It is all “expected, changed, humility” garbage….WAKE-UP and stop voting for hypocritical, lying, elitist losers.
“Judah Cohen at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) was posting an apology for not seeing this coming.
The foremost authority on the polar vortex – the swirl of air around the North Pole that exerts a significant amount of control over Northern Hemisphere weather – Cohen had EXPECTED Alaska weather to stay generally warm under the influence of an oscillating pattern of upper-atmosphere wind that pulls warm air north from the central Pacific Ocean and pushes it over Alaska into the Arctic where it chills before rippling south and east through the middle of the North American continent.
IT IS NOW looking like that pattern – which has become something of a new normal in Alaska winters of late – HAS CHANGED.
“I have said many times the first thing that you learn as a seasonal forecaster is HUMILITY and these are one of those times,” Cohen wrote on his blog the day before Christmas.”
Bryan,
Glad you are thinking of me, but let’s be clear a few cold snaps are just “weather”.
The “climate” is still warming in AK and data shows we are on par for the warmest year on record.
Remember that we used to see rivers freezing up around November in Willow…now they are freezing at the end of December.
This rapid freeze later in the season is causing the problem we now currently are seeing with the Willow Creek flooding homes and freezing vehicles on the roadway.
Ice dams froze up quickly and prevented water from flowing down stream.
Normally headwaters would freeze first and gradually freeze the river…this year the opposite happened.
Several from the borough have stated this is highly unusual and has never been seen before.
Lastly, please remember that the entire US is merely 2 percent of the globe…
Australia is burning up and the wildfires have never started this early in the season.
Too many examples to list.
The planet is warming and neither “el nino” or the “polar vortex” will change that.
My good buddy King Solomon once told me:
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Strange that you would use the land area to diminish any relevance of the US while you simply ignore the fact that Australia has 20% less land area than the US, and that the fires in Australia are obviously even smaller than the entire land area. Using your logic that means the fires in Australia are meaningless. That speaks nothing of the fact that you dismiss a cold snap as weather but a hot snap as proof of anthropogenic global warming. If you speak out of both sides of your mouth simply to try and prove anthropogenic global warming, how can anyone ever take you seriously? And now river freezing is proof of anthropogenic global warming…what did rivers do before this man made crisis/disaster/emergency?
Steve O…
It is not the “freezing” that is the problem with the Willow Creek…it is the “flooding” which is very unusual for winter in Alaska.
Increase in flooding is seen as a sign of Climate Change along with the higher yearly average temperatures.
“Floods can be deadly and cleaning them up can be costly for taxpayers and property owners.
So they get people’s attention.
There’s a tenuous scientific link, though, between weather — specific floods and storms — and climate change.”
These disasters are becoming the new norm accross the country and residents from PA to AK are taking notice.
“In the coming decades, changing the climate is likely to increase flooding, harm ecosystems, disrupt farming, and increase some risks to human health.
Our climate is changing because the earth is warming.
People have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by 40 percent since the late 1700s.”
https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-opi-climate-change-costs-pennsylvania-muschick-20191115-mxaqyumnzfdctnictlskzb6sc4-story.html
Steve S, you quote those scientific safe words again (which we saw many of in this article), “likely, expected, changed, humility, etc.”
“In the coming decades, changing the climate is “likely” to increase flooding, harm ecosystems, disrupt farming, and increase some risks to human health.”
How has “human” carbon dioxide increased by 40% since the 1700’s if we have the same level of carbon dioxide today as 3 million years ago?
“People have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by 40 percent since the late 1700s.”
Steve, you ever find any Mammoth bones?
It’s all good Steve, it was more of a rhetorical question. Ice damns are what is causing the flooding in Willow Creek by the way, it happens all over the world as water freezes and thaws…it’s truly nothing new.
I know that for true believers any and everything flies when it comes to evidence of anthropogenic global warming, here are some examples:
Colder = anthropogenic global warming
Warmer = anthropogenic global warming
Dryer = anthropogenic global warming
Wetter = anthropogenic global warming
Frozen = anthropogenic global warming
Thawed = anthropogenic global warming
More Fire = anthropogenic global warming
Less Fire = anthropogenic global warming
More Clouds = anthropogenic global warming
Less Clouds = anthropogenic global warming
Weather = anthropogenic global warming
Weather doesn’t = anthropogenic global warming
Climate = anthropogenic global warming
Climate doesn’t = anthropogenic global warming
I like how you true believers attribute 100% of the atmospheric carbon to the industrial revolution and man, as long as you do not pay attention to any actual climate science you can just make up whatever numbers you want and blame it all on man. Simply disregard any and all scientific information that does not fit your predetermined talking points.