Just some of the internet chatter brewing among meteorologists and climatologists these days/Facebook, the McEwen Weather Center
Colder, warmer, drier, wetter….
Months ago, the super-duper quadruple, never-before-seen El Niño roaring east across the equatorial Pacific Ocean toward the Americas seemed almost certain to cause a climate disruption resulting in Alaska’s largest city once again turning into Seattle north.
And now?
Well, now there is a lot more confusion as to what might happen, with the experts scratching their heads unsure of what to make of the latest environmental twists and turns.
Welcome to our third rock from the sun, hurtling through the empty nothingness of space at 66,000 miles per hour (mph) while being baked by solar rays hot enough to fry an egg in the mid-latitudes or so chill as to make a March traveler on Alaska’s Iditarod Trail wonder if the sun is capable of producing any heat at all.
All of which is only part of what creates the climates and weather on a spinning planet seasonally wobbling on its axis beneath an atmosphere of varying thicknesses. There are good reasons for a great deal of global weather confusion on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis and for some degree of climate confusion as well.
See 2019, the warmest year in Alaska history, that drew to an end with rain splattering down on snow-free, 45-degree downtown streets in Alaska’s largest city as if the Anchorage had been relocated 1,440 miles south to the edge Puget Sound.
Back those seven short years ago, subarctic Anchorage was up against an Arctic being highlighted as the fastest-warming region on the warming planet. This year, things are different.
This year the Arctic is cooling at a rate that led to October ice forming faster than had been seen in a decade. The rate of ice formation has since slowed, but far more so in the Eurasian Arctic than the North American Arctic.
There are hints this is now changing a bit, but an increasing number of meteorologists and climatologists are scratching their heads over what happens when the hot water of El Niño spins north from the tropics to meet cold air flowing south from the Arctic.
A couple of days ago, Judah Cohen, an authority on the polar vortex, called what is happening “unprecedented behavior ” in a post on X that directed folks to the Arctic Oscillation and Polar Vortex Blog he maintains for the Janus Research Group.
“Usually I try to argue what’s the correct forecast,” he wrote on X. “Here I try to convince you that whichever forecast you believe to be correct, don’t.”
This only days after the National Weather Service in Anchorage posted the official, U.S. temperature and precipitation outlook for winter 2026-27 that contained “El Niño Advisory ” and a prediction of above-average temperatures and above-average precipitation.
Still, a big qualifier was attached at the end of that post: “While El Niño does exert an influence on Alaska weather, this is a “thumb on the scale,” and is not necessarily the only or more important contributing factor.”
Alrighty then.
More to it
Apparenlty, one can’t ignore the other four digits and the palm.
A few days later he doubled down on that observation with an assessment that this is “crazy stuff from model #PolarVortex (PV) forecast!…ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) doesn’t waver from a near full PV split which is bonkers this early…..”
Crazy equals unpredictable, so let’s break down the problem here.
The polar vortex describes the air mass that swirls high above the North Pole as Earth spins its way through space. When everything is going smoothly, there’s one big swirl of holding the cold air near the pole.
“The polar vortex doesn’t always influence winter weather in the mid-latitudes,” the agency notes. “When it does, however, the effects can be extreme. When the polar vortex is especially strong…the polar jet stream tends to stay farther north and to exhibit a more zonal flow, with less meandering. At the surface, this stable stratospheric state is often associated with an even colder-than-usual Arctic, and milder-than-usual weather in the mid-latitudes.
“At the other extreme, the polar vortex is occasionally knocked off kilter when especially strong atmospheric waves in the troposphere break upward into the stratosphere. The vortex slows, and it may wobble, slide off the pole, split into several lobes, or – in the most extreme cases -temporarily reverse direction. Regardless of their ‘flavor,’ these disruptions have one thing in common: a spike in polar stratosphere temperatures, which is why they’re called sudden stratospheric warmings.”
This is not good news for people down on the planet’s surface. When the stratosphere warms, the troposphere in which we all live cools.
The troposphere stretches from sea level to 11 or 12 miles high at the equator but climbs only about four miles high at the pole. The stratosphere can sort of be thought of as both the planet’s barrier against the frigid cold of the extremely thin air above it, and a cap on the lower atmosphere containing all those things we call “weather” below.
It is the zone, NOAA says where “heat is produced in the process of the formation of ozone, and this heat is responsible for temperature increases, from an average -60°F at tropopause (the top of the troposphere) to a maximum of about 5°F (-15°C) at the top of the stratosphere.”
The temperature gradient in the troposphere runs opposite that of the stratosphere because of the Earth’s natural, radiant heating. Radiation warms the land and the sea, and this warm air rises to keep us warm.
As it rises, however, it begins to cool, resulting in those Arctic-like temperatures at the tropopause that begin to again warm in the stratosphere before temperatures again plunge in the mesosphere before rapidly heating up in the thermosphere/
Think of the atmosphere as a layer cake protecting life on the planet from both extreme cold and extreme heat.
NOAA
Cold, cold air
Above the pole, a lot of the cold air in this cake protecting the warm planet piles, with “the (polar vortex) winds enclos(ing) a large pool of extremely cold air,” as NOAA puts it. “The stronger the winds, the more the air inside is isolated from warmer latitudes, and the colder it gets” inside the vortex.
This pattern applies right up until it doesn’t.
Sometimes the polar vortex is “disrupted,” and then the cold air breaks free, gets caught in the jet stream at the top of the troposphere, and heads off to wherever the jet stream wants to take it.
Once this takes place, what happens in the Arctic no longer stays in the Arctic. It leaks south, which has consequences for the mid-latitudes. This leakage explains how it is possible to have winter days colder in Florida than in Anchorage even if this is not ‘normal,’ a weather definition defined by historic averages that zero out abnormalities.
Thus Florida winter temperatures can sometimes be colder than those in Anchorage, but Anchorage is normally cold in winter, and Florida is normally warm. Anchorage’s ‘normal’ for the month of December is 19.5 degrees, which is 52.5 degrees colder than the comfortable 72 degree normal for Miami.
Those numbers, it must also be noted, are averages of averages. Year to year, temperatures can vary greatly. The monthly averages for December in Anchorage have ranged from a high of 28.4 degrees in 1969 to a low of 0.8 degrees in 1980, according to the National Weather Service.
If you’d spent only December of 1969 in Anchorage, you’d probably have thought it a pretty comfortable place to winter, but if you’d been here only for the winter of 1980, you might have thought why not International Falls, Minn., where the average December temperature is 12.5 degrees, despite its being labeled the “Icebox of America.”
Blame that label on the U.S. Geological Survey, which used to put Alaska in the Pacific Ocean with Hawaii off the West Coast on the nation’s official map but has since made it a part of Mexico.
It would be a lot warmer in Anchorage if Alaska were located where this map puts it/USGS
So what is it actually going to be like in Anchorage this winter? That’s anyone’s guess.
But, he added, a lot depends on what the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which tracks ocean water temperatures, is doing.
“El Niños that occur during the negative (cold water) PDO mode typically produce cooler temperatures than those that occur during the positive PDO mode,” he wrote. “This result suggests that sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies that occur in the central and northern North Pacific have a large influence on winter temperatures in Alaska. SST anomalies directly influence seasonal temperatures in coastal zones due to the large heat capacity of the ocean.”
The PDO was extremely cold into the fall of 2025. It is warmer this year, but still negative. Leading into that warm, Seattle-like December of 2019, the PDO measured 0.44 for September. It was this year at minus-0.74 for the same month, but it has been warming steadily since May when it hit minus-1.64.
It could keep warming, but there is no indication this year is anything like 2019 when the PDO kept flipping between the cold phase and the warm phase. This PDO positivity actually ended at the start of 2020, and since then there hasn’t been a month when the PDO was in the warm phase.
The closest it came was minus-0.39 in December of last year. A month later it chilled out, and Anchorage set a January snowfall record. Who knows what could happen this year.
As of now, however, he says that the two events appear very similar, other than that the latest El Niño has come on faster. Still, Willis believes this winter could end up similar to 1997-98. So what did that winter look like in Alaska’s largest city?
That doesn’t sound like such a bad winter for the state’s largest city, but don’t bet on it. As Cohen said, everything is crazy at this time.
