Arctic Storm - Weaker Than Expected

This is just a quick update to note that the Arctic storm that was advertised last week failed to strengthen as much as the ECMWF forecast suggested.  The minimum central pressure dropped to about 980mb, which is quite low - some years do not produce any storms this strong in the Arctic during summer - but not as low as the model indicated.  For a forecast made only about 3 days ahead, this is not very good, which illustrates that Arctic weather remains difficult to predict.

Here's a sequence of MSLP maps, courtesy of Environment Canada.

3am AKST Saturday June 24:

3pm AKST Sunday June 25:

3pm AKST Monday June 26:

Hail in Eagle

Eagle was hit with quite a hail storm yesterday afternoon - here's photographic evidence via the NWS Twitter feed.

Hail at Eagle AK, between 3-4pm today. Courtesy John Borg. pic.twitter.com/Uk1U634iKk

— NWS Fairbanks (@NWSFairbanks) June 24, 2017

Here's how the storm was described in a NWS statement:

"The town of Eagle had a thunderstorm from 3 to 4 pm today with hail lasting for over one half hour. By the time the storm was over, an inch or more of hail was covering the ground. Some of the hail was one half inch in diameter. Eagle also had winds gusting to 25 mph, and had over sixty-six hundredths of an inch (0.66) of rain from that storm. A long time weather observer in Eagle reports that they have not had a storm like this since the 1970s."

And here's an animation of webcam images from the airport, showing the dramatic approach of the storm and what appear to be hailstones falling in one of the shots.  Note that the airport only reported 0.25" of precipitation and appears to have had much less hail; but the airport is more than a mile away from the village.

By way of explanation, the main culprit appears to be high humidity.  Surface dewpoints were in the upper 40s yesterday in Eagle as the temperature rose to 78°F, leading to convective instability.  Furthermore, the Fairbanks sounding from yesterday afternoon showed a rather notable moist layer in the mid-troposphere (750-500mb), and this is a favorable environment for storm updrafts to be maintained without dilution by surrounding dry air.

The upper-air map shows a ridge in place over northwest Canada, but high pressure certainly does not always translate into clear and dry weather - notice the correspondence of yesterday's lightning strikes with the upper ridge location.  Note also the lightning on the North Slope; Deadhorse reported a thunderstorm - a rare occurrence up there.

Arctic Storm On Tap

Last summer I remarked on an intense low pressure system over the high Arctic in August and noted that strong Arctic storms seem to have occurred rather frequently in summer in recent years.  Another instance of this phenomenon appears likely to develop early next week, according to the highly-regarded ECMWF forecast model; it will be interesting to see how strong this one gets.

Here's a map of predicted sea-level pressure and 850mb wind speed for 3am AKST on Tuesday; the minimum pressure is about 968mb, which is comparable to the storm last August.  This is also close to the all-time record for lowest pressure in the Arctic domain during the summer months.

The map above shows the forecast from a single run of the model, but of course it's nice to look at the ensemble data to get an idea of uncertainty.  Here's a chart of the ensemble mean, minimum, and maximum of the 70-90°N minimum pressure; so we see that on average the 51 ensemble members show a minimum pressure of around 967mb on Sunday evening (Alaska time).  The peak intensity is consistent with the single model run shown above, but the ensemble shows a faster-developing storm.

Based on the window of ensemble forecasts, there appears to be a high chance that the storm will deepen below 980mb, and the most extreme member shows a pressure of below 960mb; this outcome is unlikely, but perhaps not impossible.

North Slope Thaw

It's been a cold month so far along Alaska's Arctic coast, but webcam views are finally showing change in the fresh water environment as winter's ice begins to disappear.  The two images below were taken a little over 72 hours apart at Wadepiper Lake, close to Teshekpuk Lake, with conditions this afternoon obviously much more hospitable for avian visitors.

The much larger Teshekpuk Lake has seen much less change in the last 3 days and appears to still be mostly frozen over:

Here's a nice chart from Rick showing how unusual the cool conditions have been in Barrow lately: the first half of June was the coolest in more than 40 years.

Frost Returns

The climate extremes of Alaska's interior have been on display in the past few days, with hard freezes this morning in places that were downright hot a few days ago.  For example, the Salcha RAWS dropped to 23°F this morning after reporting 90°F on Friday.

Perhaps more amazingly, the high-quality Tok 70SE CRN site reached 26°F today after being at 94°F on Friday.  It would be interesting to see how often a feat like this occurs anywhere in the U.S.; I imagine it might not be too uncommon in the desert southwest, but Alaska can compete when it comes to rapid temperature changes even in summer.

The map below shows the widespread extent of the freeze this morning in many of the typically colder parts of the southeast interior.

The two 500mb charts below illustrate the change in upper-air pattern that brought about the dramatic temperature drop; the first shows the 500mb analysis at 4pm on Friday, and the second shows this morning's analysis.  Notice the dashed lines, which depict the mean temperature (thickness) of the lower troposphere, in Friday's map; they show a bullseye of warmth essentially right over the Tok 70SE site.  Farther west over the interior, very warm air was brought up from the south and downsloped off the Alaska Range.

In contrast, by this morning a different upper ridge had developed over northwest Alaska, and much cooler air from the northeast was in place over the interior; and then favored spots with calm winds and clear skies were able to drop below freezing during the hours of minimal solar insolation.

Heat Update

Here's a list of the highest reliable temperatures observed in the recent heat wave: all are found in the Tanana River valley, from Fairbanks up to the Tok 70SE CRN site (at 2000' elevation, close to the Alaska Highway, and only 10 miles from the border with Canada).

94°F   Tok 70SE
92°F   Whitestone Farms COOP
91°F   Tok #2 COOP (June 9 and June 10)
90°F   North Pole COOP
90°F   Ester 5NE COOP
90°F   Fairbanks Intl AP

The Tok 70SE site experiences a remarkably continental climate with large diurnal temperature ranges in summer; the low temperature on Friday was 43°F, and just 3 days earlier it was 29°F.

Here are the temperatures recorded by the various thermometers at the CRN site, at 5-minute intervals from 5-6pm AKDT on Friday.  The maximum of 34.3°C is 93.7°F; pretty impressive for the 9th of June.

Interior Heat Wave

The heat is on across the interior today, with temperatures pushing up to 90°F in some spots.  The map below shows the high temperatures through about 5pm; note that RAWS thermometers tend to run several degrees too warm on days like this, so most of the low 90s are probably erroneous.  Nevertheless, at 5pm it was a very consistent 89°F at Fairbanks airport, Fort Wainwright, and Eielson AFB.

Assuming the high temperature reaches 90°F in Fairbanks today [update: confirmed by NWS], this is quite a rare event; it happened in 2013 (two days), once in each of 2009 and 2010, but prior to that 90°F was not reached at all from 1995 through 2008.  Today is almost but not quite the earliest in the year that 90°F has been reached; the only earlier occasion was May (!) 28 in 1947.

It's hard to imagine, but temperatures on the eastern North Slope this afternoon are actually below freezing; Barter Island has been hovering around 28°F all day.  It was 23°F in Barrow this morning with clear skies and a strong breeze; it was a beautiful scene, but amazingly cool considering the heat on the other side of the Brooks Range.

The temperature difference we're seeing here between the North Slope and the interior is right at the limit of what has been observed historically at this time of year; for example, the largest difference in daily high temperatures between Fairbanks and Barrow is 58°F in June, and it looks like today's difference will be about 55°F (90°F vs 35°F).

The largest summer-time same-day high temperature difference between Fairbanks and Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay is 55°F, which occurred in the late June heat wave of 2013 (92°F in Fairbanks, 37°F in Deadhorse).  With the temperature reaching only 32°F so far today in Deadhorse, the record may be broken.

Arctic Winter Warmth

Last week's post on Chukchi Sea ice (or lack of it) prompted me to look back at the past winter and examine just how warm it was around the Arctic Ocean.  Back in April we saw that the warmth was quite extreme compared to normal (see here and here), but let's look at some alternative data sets to get a sense of the magnitude of the anomaly.

First, here's a map of the October-April mean temperature anomaly, i.e. departure from the standard 1981-2010 normal, based on the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis.  This is the 2m temperature output from the reanalysis model - so it does not represent ground truth observations, but nevertheless it's useful.  The amplitude of the anomaly is extraordinary, greater than +6°C over a broad swath from the Chukchi Sea to the area around Franz Josef Land, and over +10°C in parts of the latter region.

The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis is rather outdated now (the model is over 20 years old), so it's worth looking at some more modern alternatives.  Here are the results from a couple of other reanalysis products:

While there are some modest regional differences between the maps, with MERRA-2 in particular showing less extreme warmth over the Arctic Ocean, the patterns are qualitatively the same.  Moreover, all three models show that the seven months ending April 2017 were the warmest such period in the Arctic region for the entire reanalysis period - warmer even than winter 2015-2016.  The chart below shows the 65-90°N area average of the 2m temperature anomaly according to the three reanalyses.  Despite the models showing some differences in the long-term trends, they agree that the past two winters were much warmer than any others in the modern era.

The obvious next question is - what about actual temperature measurements?  Do thermometer readings at weather stations support the huge warm anomaly produced by the models?  Based on a set of 19 long-term observing sites that I've used previously on this blog, the answer is unequivocally "yes".  The chart below shows monthly mean temperature anomalies from these Arctic sites, and remarkably the 19-station mean temperature was over 3°C above normal for each month from October through April this winter.  (But note that in May the average temperature returned to almost exactly normal.)

If we compare the observed temperature anomalies (from the 19 stations) with the reanalysis model temperatures, it's rather amazing to see that the station data shows even more warming than the models, and winter 2016-2017 was warmer than 2015-2016 by a larger margin.  Of course the stations are not evenly distributed around the Arctic - we could especially use a few more in the Canadian Arctic - but it does seem possible that the models may actually be underestimating the magnitude of warming.

Finally, the area-average reanalysis temperatures from the high Arctic, 80-90°N, show a 7-month average temperature anomaly of approximately 4-6°C above normal, which is greater than for the Arctic basin as a whole.  Of course this represents a very small area of the Earth's surface, but it's a striking anomaly nonetheless.  It's no surprise, really, that estimated Arctic sea ice volume at the end of May was about the same as the normal ice volume for the month of July (see the figure below).

[Update June 20]

A reader pointed me to the reanalysis intercomparison tool at NOAA ESRL, which I've seen before but had forgotten when I put this post together.  Happily, the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis and MERRA-2 results from NOAA's tool appear to be identical to mine:

Extending the Tanana River at Nenana Spring Break-up Date Record

Hi, Rick T. here. One of the omnipresent issues in doing climate-scale analysis for Alaska is the comparatively short record of most variables at most places. So when a chance comes along to extend a record, we jump at it. To that end, yesterday I stumbled across several lists of break-up dates on the Chena River at Fairbanks. The version below was published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on March 19, 1951. You will immediately notice this record starts in 1903 and is unbroken through 1950. In the same issue, the News-Miner also published break-up dates and times for the Tanana River at Nenana, which are the same as we use today and are available from many sources.

Now the Chena River today is a much different watercourse than it was when E.T. Barnette was unceremoniously booted off the Lavelle Young on the south bank of the Chena River on August 26, 1901. For our purposes here, the major event was the 1940s construction of the dike from Moose Creek Bluff across Piledriver Slough, which over time effectively ended the flow of Tanana River water into what today we call the Chena River at Fairbanks (Chena Slough in the early days). More details on this history can be found in this 2000 USGS report on Noyes Slough Restoration Project. So while this list may be primarily of historical interest for Fairbanks, can we use it to learn something about the timing of break-up of the Tanana River at Nenana prior to the start of observations in 1917?

The first thing I did was look at the correlation of the Chena River at Fairbanks dates against the Tanana at Nenana dates for the 34 years of overlapping data, 1917-1950 (plotted below). The correlation is considerably higher than I expected (+0.94), with 1940 (and to a lesser extent 1919) the only significant outlier. In general, break-up on the Chena River occurred a few days before the ice went out at Nenana, but there are several years (e.g. 1919 and 1920) when Chena dates are later than the Tanana at Nenana. So how can we use this to estimate break-up dates 1903-1916, when we have dates for the Chena at Fairbanks but not the Tanana at Nenana?

The simplest way is to just apply the regression equation (plotted above) using the 1903-1916 Chena at Fairbanks dates as the predictor. This will yield a single value, but there are of course uncertainties. There are many methods we could use to estimate the uncertainty of the estimated Tanana at Nenana dates, but here I'll simply use the standard errors of the regression coefficients to generate some idea of the uncertainly of our estimated dates. For the 10th to 90th percentile estimate, this turns out to be a bit under three days either side of the mean estimate. Below is a plot with the estimated dates and uncertainty estimates prepended to the observed data.

The estimated dates look reasonable when compared with the climate data that we have for the central Interior for this period: there are some cool springs (e.g. 1914) and a couple of warm springs (most notably 1912). All in all, it seems pretty clear that break-up dates on the Tanana River at Nenana in the 14 years prior to the start what we now call the Ice Classic were typical of the pre-World War Two era dates and not like the modern, early break-ups.

Rapid Chukchi Melt

The seasonal melt of sea ice is off to a fast start this year in the Chukchi Sea, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  The daily-updating multi-sensor ice analysis, which is available from 2006 onward, shows that the decline is several weeks ahead of the recent normal.

The latest NWS analysis shows a remarkably wide zone of open water off the northwest coast of Alaska.

Farther to the south, the ice is just about gone from the Bering Sea, which is not unprecedented for this date but definitely unusual.  It's interesting to see the advance of seasonal ice retreat since 2012: nearly every year has seen a faster melt-out than the year before in the Bering Sea.

In contrast, Beaufort Sea ice is in much better shape than last year, and the Arctic Ocean as a whole currently has a greater ice extent than last year.

For reference, here's a map showing the boundaries of the ocean regions as defined by NSIDC.

1 - Beaufort Sea
2 - Chukchi Sea
3 - East Siberian Sea
4 - Laptev Sea
5 - Kara Sea
6 - Barents Sea
7 - Greenland Sea
8 - Baffin Bay / Gulf of St Lawrence
9 - Canadian Archipelago
10 - Hudson Bay
11 - Central Arctic
12 - Bering Sea
13 - Baltic Sea
14 - Sea of Okhotsk
15 - Yellow Sea
16 - Cook Inlet

[Update June 4] The first map below shows that wind speeds were lower than normal in May over the southern Chukchi Sea area, according to reanalysis data; so we probably can't blame the early melt on increased storminess.  It was, however, warmer than normal throughout the region in May; and winter as a whole was extraordinarily warm (see the third map below).  There's little doubt that Chukchi Sea ice was much thinner and weaker than normal as melting commenced this spring.

The PIOMAS model's estimated Arctic ice volume is at record lows (see below), so I wouldn't be surprised to see the remarkable Chukchi Sea ice loss extend to other areas in the coming months.