A Few Notes

A change of weather pattern in the past week or so has brought an end (for now) to extremely wet weather across interior and western Alaska, and clear skies have produced widespread overnight freezes for the past several days - as befits the time of year.  Contrast the mid-atmosphere height (pressure) pattern in the past week with the pattern that produced excessive interior rains earlier in the month:

It's worth pointing out that Google's WeatherNext2 AI forecast anticipated the change from about 10 days in advance, with a stronger signal than other models: see the end of my post here:

https://ak-wx.blogspot.com/2026/09/windy-and-wet.html

The WeatherNext model is easily the most skillful of the current generation of medium-range forecast models, and has just been upgraded to version 3.

Rick Thoman's latest post discusses the very unusual late season peak in water flow for several interior rivers: in some instances, the highest flows on record this late in the season.

https://alaskaclimate.substack.com/p/rivers-running-high-in-interior-alaska

The cloudy, wet weather earlier in the month seems to have significantly delayed the progress of autumn foliage colors across interior and southern Alaska.  Colors were peaking in Fairbanks last weekend, but remarkably there was very little color in the Anchorage area earlier this week.  Here's a photo I took on Wednesday morning (September 23) looking over a very green southern portion of Anchorage (Turnagain Arm to the left):

On another note, western Alaska "dodged a bullet" this week in terms of a strong Bering Sea storm involving ex-typhoon Dujuan, which previously caused a lot of problems in Japan.  High winds affected southwestern Alaska, bringing memories of last year's devastating ex-Halong, but the latest event was more of a glancing blow than a direct hit, and flooding was not severe.  The sequence of maps below shows the 6-hourly progression of low pressure from the central Aleutians to the Bering Sea waters west of Nunivak Island.

Peak wind gusts on Thursday exceeded 84 mph in Cold Bay, with sustained winds as high as 62 mph - the highest sustained wind measurement for over 6 years in Cold Bay.

78 mph gusts were observed on Akun Island - near Dutch Harbor - and Cape Newenham on the mainland briefly measured 86 mph in a squall.  Here's a map of reported peak wind gusts in mph:

Finally, the unseasonable daytime warmth that is now prevailing in the interior (courtesy of chinook winds downstream of the Bering low) will soon end, and the inevitable temperature decline toward freeze-up will resume.  Judging only from the temperature forecast, Google's WeatherNext2 model suggests snow may be in the cards by the end of the week; the following graphic shows the forecast ensemble 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for Fairbanks: