Anchorage’s Richard Murphy at work to keep the roof from caving in on his winter’s supply of firewood

Alaska’s snowy, frozen urban core

The nine feet of snow now burying Alaska’s largest metro area should have come as but a small surprise.

With a relatively strong El Niño in the Pacific Ocean pushing warm water north, there was always a possibility the winter could be wetter than normal even if the statistical odds from past El Niño years pointed to a higher likelihood of warmer and drier conditions.

Statistically, as Brian Brettschneider, climate services program manager for the National Weather Service’s Alaska Region, observed in the summer, “there is a strong inverse relationship between El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and winter precipitation in Alaska, meaning El Niños are linked to lower precipitation and La Niñas tend to result in higher winter precipitation.

However, he added the caveat, that “the dominant pattern in an El Niño winter is enhanced winds from the south or southeast, which brings air from the open waters of the north Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Alaska into the mainland.

“Water temperatures in these areas are in the low 40s to mid-50 degrees, and the airmass above the water is of a similar temperature. The temperature of the air mass over the open water is far warmer than the typical airmass over Alaska during the winter months. Any time winds from the south develop in winter, the temperature increases dramatically.”

These winds can, however, sometimes bring considerable precipitation ashore with them. Alaska’s urbanized underbelly has become semi-famous for the “atmospheric rivers” that can delug the region when the winds flow north. 

There are a lot of moving parts in play that determine how cold, wet and warm this part of the state as John Papineau, one of Brettschneider’s predecessors at the Weather Service noted in a 2005 El Niño paper warning how hard it can be to predict what will happen along the state’s northern Gulf Coast. 

Brettschneider, as late as Jan. 10, was sticking with his prediction for a drier-than-normal winter for Anchorage, responding to a question on a Climate.gov blog with the observation that “it’s true that Alaska has been wetter-than-average so far this winter, in contrast with the typical El Nino conditions…but let’s keep in mind that we’re not even halfway through meteorological winter, so we’ll have to see how the rest of the season plays out.”

He has since revised that view.

“About two-thirds of the time, El Niño winters are less snowy around here,” he told Fox News this week. “But a third of the time, it’s more snowy. So, sometimes, all the stars come into alignment, and that’s what’s happened here.”

And “more snowy,” might be an understatement. Anchorage ended the month of January within 34 inches of the record snowfall of 134.5 inches – nearly 15 feet – in the winter of 2011-2012. 

The decadal, average snowfall for Anchorage in February is 13.9 inches; in March, 8.7; in April, 5.4; and in May (yes, it still snows in May in Anchorage), 0.1. The total there is 28.1 inches, which leaves Anchorage just shy of the record if everything is average.

So far, however, this winter has been anything but average. Snowfall to date is nearly two and a half times the norm, and if Anchorage stays even 25 percent above the norm for the next four months, it will set a new record.

Predictably unpredictable predictions

Needless to say, the future is impossible for anyone to accurately predict, and in that regard, Brettschneider deserves a break on the temperature front.

There is little precedent in modern times for the extreme cold that has followed the snow into Anchorage in this El Niño year. For decades now, El Niño winters have spelled warmth.

Not this year. For seven of the last eight days, the city’s highest temperature for the day has failed to warm up to the level of the normal lowest temperature for the day. The exception was Tuesday when the day’s high temperature climbed to 14 degrees, two degrees above the average low temperature for the day but 10 degrees below the average high.

The low for the day was 2 degrees at the Ted Stevens International Airport, a notorious warm spot. Other parts of the state’s largest city were reporting temperatures down to 20 degrees below zero. The airport itself spent much of the week below zero.

And the forecast for Thursday called for temperatures to drop to 20 degrees below zero, unusual for Anchorage in any case and especially in a modern El Niño year, although this has not always been the case.

“Of particular interest is the fact that most El Niños since the 1976-77 event have been
on the warm side, while previous El Niños often tended to be cool,” Papineau noted back in 2005. He linked this to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) which has traditionally altered ocean temperatures in the Pacific from cool to warm.

El Niños in the winters of both 1965-66 and 1968-69 produced unusually cold temperatures in Anchorage. Nineteen-sixty-six was the sixth coldest winter in Anchorage history, according to the Weather Service, with an average temperature of 32.9 degrees, and 1969 was the 25th coldest in the 107 years on record between 1916 and 2023.

The El Niño year of 1966 was nearly 10 degrees colder than 2019, the warmest year on record with a temperature of  42.5 degrees leading to Alaska being considered something of the canary in the coal mine for global warming.

“The top five warmest temperatures for the (Alaska) area all occurred after 2014, with the least snow recorded during the 2014-15 season,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed in 2020.

In case anyone has forgotten, the Alaska weather of 2019 was national and international news.

“Alaska just had the most ridiculous summer. That’s a red flag for the planet,” CNN headlined in the early fall of that year.

“After decades of seeing their warnings fall on deaf ears – especially in a state funded by oil – scientists like Brettschneider hope that the indisputable clues across a baked Alaska will inspire real action, from Juneau to Washington, D.C., CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir gushed, apparently having missed the difference between weather and climate.

“We’ve talked about these things occurring in decades or in centuries, but … it’s happening right now and it’s visible right now and it’s noticeable right now,” Brettshneider told him. “The opportunity to do things about it is right now and not decades down the road. So, in one sense, it’s really bad, but people tend to kind of step up and do something about it when they feel a sense of urgency, and there really is a sense of urgency right now.”

The run of warm winters from 2014 to 2019 are, however, increasingly looking like an anomaly, which is not to say the planet isn’t warming. It is to say that since 2020 Anchorage has moved more back in line with the creep toward ever warmer years rather than the rocket ride toward ever warmer years.

The past year – 2023 – actually ended with the annual temperature three-tenths of a degree below what the Weather Service considers the long-term “normal.” But the long-term, temperature trendline remains on an upward trajectory.

The planet is warming. Most, though not all, scientists are in agreement on this.

The warming is, however, measured in fractions of degrees per year, not degrees per year let alone 10 degrees. The National Centers for Environmental Information put the change at “an average rate of 0.08°C (0.14°F) per decade since 1880 and over twice that rate 0.18°C (0.32°F) since 1981.”

An increase of about a degree every three decades since 1981 is worrisome. The change has resulted in the noticeable shrinkage of Alaska glaciers, the northward march of the forest in the 49th state, the melting of permafrost in the Arctic, a boom in sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, and a Gulf of Alaska explosion of pink salmon.

Still, Anchorage – with a normal annual temperature of 37.6 degrees – has a long way to go before it becomes Los Angeles – average annual temperature 65.4 – or even Seattle at 52.4  or Minneapolis at 46.1, and an explosion of pink salmon in many Gulf of Alaska streams and rivers. 

If that 0.32 degree per decade increase continues, it is also worth noting Anchorage could be as warm as Minneapolis, which is not considered a particularly warm place, in about 250 years.

If.

And even with an average annual temperature of 46.1, Minneapolis remains capable of annual weather variations that could leave it with a snowy and cold winter like Anchorage is experiencing this year, although probably not with so much snow.

Northern marine climates are, in general, subject to a lot more precipitation than northern continental climates.

Tough it out

The good news here is that if new Anchorage residents can survive this winter, the odds are the next one will be milder. There’s no given, but that’s what the long-term trend would indicate unless you choose to believe crazy scientists from Russia, a nation producing ever more oil and gas from the Arctic.

This could be because Russia’s political leaders don’t care about climate change, or it could be because some of their scientists are telling them not to worry about climate change even if most of the world’s scientists, including many if not most in Russia, disagree.

Still, consider the words of Andrey Fedotov, director of the Limnological Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a man with a doctorate in geological and mineralogical sciences, now in charge of studies at Lake Baikal, which he calls “the deepest, most ancient, most beautiful, most mysterious lake.”

The lake, he contends, holds a record of the planet’s prehistoric climate that should not be ignored, and “my main job, even before I became director, was studying the climate of the past.

“Everyone is talking about global warming, but in fact everything is leading to the fact that on Earth, in a million years, such periods as we currently live in last 10 to 12 thousand years. We were already into the 13th thousand when warming began. It should end soon. And the reason for this is not a person, but the ‘relationship’ between the sun and the Earth.

“Now we are in a prosperous period, but let’s move on to a disadvantaged one. It’s inevitable. According to my estimates, the transition should occur in 2030 – 2035.

“But I can’t predict this (accurately) anymore. But the fact that the system will move to another level is certain. Now our task is to understand and interpret all this.

“Now everyone (in Russia) is talking about the Northern Sea Route. I would not dare to say that after 2035 it will not freeze.

“Until 1870, the Russian Academy of Sciences said that the Kara Sea is an ‘ice cellar,’ navigation in it is impossible due to the fact that it is clogged with ice all year round. Ten years later, shipping in the Kara Sea reached its maximum! The ice disappeared completely in the summer. In other words, the restructuring process is happening very quickly. And it also goes in the opposite direction.

“When we studied the Taimyr lakes, there was an effect that I call the effect of a heated frying pan: solar activity is already subsiding, and the permafrost is melting for another five years and giving off heat. When you’ve fried the potatoes, the frying pan is on the counter, but it’s still sizzling. And here the same effect. The sun no longer shines so hot, but the permafrost will only finish accumulating solar heat in five years.”

“So the Ice Age has already arrived, but we haven’t felt it yet,” an interviewer asked him.

“No. When it comes, you will feel it immediately.”

Most climate scientists disagree with Fedotov on the long term forecast, but with the last conclusion most in the Anchorage metro area would now agree: “When the Ice Age arrives, you will feel it immediately.”

Correction: This is an edited version of the original story which seriously overstated how long it would take Anchorage to become Minneapolis at the current rate of global warming.