Sunday, September 20, 2015

The Extreme Frontier

There may be no other state that typifies strange weather in 2015 than Alaska. Where do we begin?
January was the wettest on record in Juneau, and the December-February period was the state's seventh warmest. Anchorage saw its record least snowy season, picking up only 25.1 inches of snow from fall through spring.
That's all notable enough. Then spring became even more strange.
Record April warmth in Anchorage was followed by record May warmth for the entire state, when statewide data was compiled. This included America's northernmost city, Barrow.
On May 23, the village of Eagle topped out at 91 degrees, the earliest-in-season 90s on record anywhere in our 49th state. 
About one week later on June 1, a location southeast of Fairbanks saw about an inch of snow, you know, that stuff that had been lacking in Anchorage all season.
During the spring melt, the swollen Sagavanirktok River flooded and damaged sections of the Dalton Highway, the only link by road to Alaska's North Slope, not once, but twice.
By mid-June, wildfires had erupted over the state's dry interior, many of which were started by lightning, belching out a pall of dense smoke in Fairbanks, among other locations


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