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Who you gonna call?

A frigid blue Alaska/AER prediction

WARNING: “We are on the cusp or teetering towards a troposphere-stratosphere-troposphere coupling event that includes both a strong stratospheric polar vortex and a positive Arctic oscillation.”

This on Monday from Dr. Judah Cohen.

No, not the Ghostbusters guy. That was Dr. Peter Veckman who warned of a “disaster of biblical proportions….human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

Cohen is an atmospheric scientist who spends his time looking not for specters from space but at the movements of the air high above the earth in an effort to forecast the coming winter weather for a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER).

And what he is and has been warning about with all this atmospheric mumbo-jumbo is a possible replay of the winter of  2011/2012 though he is careful to couch his observations with the note that although “comparisons with 2020 keep popping up, not least of which is that it preceded a La Niña winter….the winter 2011/12 was highly unusual and a repeat should not be expected.”

Anchorage residents can only hope the planet doesn’t hit the repeat button. Highly unusual would be something of an understatement for 2011/2012.

Those who were resident in the state’s largest city at the time remember winter snows of near biblical proportions,– a cold, white version of the Great Flood before which “the Lord said to Noah….I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.”

Only the Great Snowpocalypse went on for a lot more than 40 days and 40 nights, and Anchorage residents were given no warning.

The winter started off normal enough with significant but by no means startling amounts of moisture in November (sound familiar to this week?), and then it began snowing and snowing and snowing.

By the time the snow finally stopped falling in April, a record 134.5 inches – or more than 11 feet – had fallen.

A standard basketball hoop rises 10 feet above the floor. The gutters on a single-story house are usually about 11 feet high.

Suffice to say, there was a lot of snow. Plow companies ran out of places to store it. Some roofs caved in under the weight of it. Homeowners exhausted themselves shoveling it.

Torturous amounts

The Washington Post was moved to sum the season with the headline “Alaska’s cruel winter.”

Just days before the record was reached, National Weather Service climatologist John Papineau noted the difficulty Anchorage drivers had faced in negotiating “narrow, snow-choked side streets.

“Nevertheless it has been a boom season for snow removal contractors and auto body repair shops. Skiers enjoyed a season of plenty when it wasn’t windy, rainy or locked in a deep freeze of sub-zero temperatures.”

Strangely, he added, a considerable portion of the “season’s snow fell during cold stretches. As a rule of thumb, warm air – when the temperature near the ground is in the 20s to lower 30s – is more conducive to snowfall than chillier temperatures.”

That rule remained true in 2011/2012, but way more snow than normal came down on days with a mean temperature below 10 degrees. The amount was near twice as much as the record 16.5 inches of cold snow that fell in 1954-55.

Guess what?

Cohen’s prediction for midmonth this year calls for temperatures to cool, and “colder temperatures are predicted to support new snowfall across Alaska, much of Canada.”

Enjoy this warm spell while it lasts and go buy a snow shovel, or maybe a snowblower. Or not.

As Cohen readily admits, “there are no givens in weather forecasting.”

Still he adds, “the possibility of strong polar vortez/positive Arctic Oscillation seems increasingly likely, and it would likely last through much of December and possibly even into January.”

That usually portends mild weather for the U.S. East Coast and the opposite for Alaska where 2011/12 had resident joking about the coming of a new Ice Age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12 replies »

  1. Watch your A$$ if heading into the back-country this week.
    Two feet of wet snow with a warming trend makes for significant avalanche danger.
    I can still remember when the rivers froze before all the snow arrived, but those years are gone and will probably never return to Alaska.

  2. I remember working in Valdez at The Terminal that summer.Loader hands were still pushing snow around in the Tank farms well into july.Unreal amounts of snow still on the ground.
    A year or two later,Gargantuan snow slide came down into the head of keystone canyon,blocked the lowe river for over a week.
    Finally a massive cut 50-75 ft deep was made by dozers working round the clock for a fee days

  3. Fortunately, Obama moved the weather station from Merrill Field Airport to the International Airport. Now, Anchorage has less snowfall and warmer weather………….

  4. Why is military mandating mask wearing at JBER?
    It is just the baby flu.
    Who got to the military?

    Soros again?

    follow the money

  5. “Who are you going to call”??? Let’s start by calling Joe Biden and asking for our trillions back from that phony “Global Warming, man-made Clime Change, etc”, (whatever the flavor is of the week) scamdemic. Next tie dementia Joe’s hands so he cannot sign the fraudulent Paris Accords and appoint that other fraud John Kerry.
    Amazing how gullible, stupid, and naive people are.

    • Wow! Oh Yeah! Here we go again!

      Well, I was feelin sad and feelin blue
      I didn’t know what in the world I was gonna to do
      Them Communists they was comin around
      They was in the air
      They was on the ground
      They wouldn’t give me no peace

      So I run down most hurriedly
      And joined up with the John Birch society
      I got me a secret membership card
      And started off a walkin’ down the road
      Tee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now
      Look out you commies

      Well, I was lookin’ everywhere for those gol-darned Reds
      I got up in the mornin’ ‘n’ and looked under my bed
      Looked in the sink, behind the door
      Looked in the glove compartment of my car
      Couldn’t find ‘em

      • Heck Jame’s, what about Obama’s Czar Van Jones, an admitted COMMUNIST that was in the WHITE HOUSE. What about the COMMUNIST Mao bulbs Obama sported on the WHITE HOUSE Christmas tree? What about Bernie, AOC, Talib, and the rest of those MARXIST parasitic morons?The list actually goes on Jame’s if you cared to do some research.

      • James, you ok ? Dont you agree all lives matter? (except pinks in the refrigerated boat hold ? )

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