A warm El Niño winter in 2015-2016 gave a snowshoe hare nowhere to hide in Anchorage/Craig Medred photo

Anchorage weather could make big flip

After one of the coldest winters in a long time, coming as it did on the heels of a very snowy winter, Alaska’s largest city now looks to be headed back to the future.

Meteorologists have been talking about a “Super El Niño” for months now, and the Anchorage office of the National Weather Service has finally posted an El Niño advisory from the agency’s Climate Prediction Center suggesting a warm winter.

With weather in Alaska, there are never any guarantees. But if the past is precedent….

Well, suffice it to say that the Weather Service cites the winter of 2015-16 when there was but a “very strong” El Niño versus what CNN is calling a “Super El Niño…(that) could end up being even worse than anticipated.”

Would that make it a super ‘Super El Nino’?

Whatever the case, this one is looking even bigger than 2015-16, and by February of that winter, a regularly rainy downtown Anchorage was nearly snow-free with everyone instead slipping and sliding on the water atop remnant snow packed into ice.

The Weather Service was describing that as a weather “anomaly ” that by mid-month had the Alaska communities of Eagle, Northway, McGrath, Bethel, King Salmon and not-so-cold Cold Bay on pace for winter “record warm,” with every other community from Ketchikan north, including Anchorage, on a “near record warm” pace.

Downtown Anchorage in February 2016/Craig Medred photo

The Iditarod Trail Invitational – the fat bike, ski and foot race from Knik to McGrath and beyond – was that year  swimming its way north as the month drew to a close.

The ‘Dismal Swamp’ section of the Iditarod Trail looking pretty swampy at the end of February 2026/Craig Medred photo

With the Iditarod Trail a mess, and the situation in Anchorage even worse, the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race had to cut its ceremonial, March start in Alaska’s largest city to a three-mile ride down city streets covered with seven-train-car loads of snow the Alaska Railroad hauled in from farther north. 

“Key personnel within the Municipality of Anchorage’s street maintenance, parks and recreation, and police
departments worked very hard to try to find a way for us to go the full 11 miles to the BLM Campbell Tract. Unfortunately, the warm temperatures persisted and it is no longer possible this year,” then race-CEO Stan Hooley said.

By then, it was so warm north of the Alaska Range that Invitational fat bikers already into Interior Alaska were stripping down to stay cool in temperatures in the 40s.

Fat-tired cyclist Heather Best in a tank top on the trail to McGrath where ‘normal’ March temps are closer to 40 degrees below zero than 40 above/Craig Medred photo

The dog race did tough it out that year and launch its restart north from Willow along the traditional trail, and mushers were lucky to find adequate snow remaining on the south slope of the Alaska Range and down through the Dalzell Gorge.

But on the trail north of Rohn, wheels – rather than runners – would have been useful on the sleds. And complaints about rough trail in 2016 helped to encourage Iditarod to move its restart north to Fairbanks after another warm winter in 2016-2017.

There is, of course, no way to predict for certain that a super El Niño will mean a ridiculously warm winter in Anchorage. The connection between the El Niño current pushing warm water north into the North Pacific and Anchorage witness Seattle-like warmth is a constant.

There have been sizable El Niño years when the weather in Alaska’s largest city stayed near normal. If there is such a thing as normal. Normal, in Weather Service terms, is the median between extremes. Suffice to say, there is a lot of hard-to-explain, natural variability in Alaska weather.

The El Niño of 2019 was short and weak, and yet, despite that, the year 2019 wound to an end with rain splattering down on snow-free, 45-degree downtown streets that looked more like what one would expect to see in Seattle than in Anchorage on New Year’s Eve.

But Alaska was in 2019 coming off the warmest year in the state’s history, and things were about to change. Snow started falling the next day. Temperatures dropped. And Anchorage went back to being the Anchorage of old.

The winters that followed were more like the old Anchorage, and when a moderate El Nino came north in 2023-2024, Anchorage experienced its second-snowiest winter on record. 

Anchorage motorists spent a good part of that winter complaining about how hard it was to get around in Alaska’s largest city and blaming city officials for not removing snow fast enough or leaving frozen ruts in the road that wrecked cars.

“Last night while driving north on Jewel Lake, we saw our fourth truck/car, with a broken front axle,” one of them posted in a Nextdoor, social-media discussion about city roads. “There is still one parked on Strawberry just after getting off the Minnesota Bypass. Never before in 20 years have we seen so many broken front axles.”

In a city where motorists now don’t know enough to slow down when hitting frozen ruts or frozen snow, maybe a Seattle-like winter wouldn’t be so bad.