Arctic Village
Coldfoot
Chandalar Shelf
The medium-range forecast is showing a fresh dose of cold air moving into northern and interior Alaska over the weekend, so it appears the cool spell will persist. The models have steadily trended colder in the past several days, so it will be interesting to see just how chilly it gets. Here's an example of how the models have trended colder: the chart below shows the forecast 850mb temperature for a grid point near Fairbanks, from the last 4 runs of the ECMWF deterministic model. The earliest run (Saturday afternoon's run) is in blue and the most recent (this morning's) is in purple. To put this in perspective, the normal 850mb temperature at Fairbanks drops below 0°C on the 20th. In 1992, the 850mb temperature reached -11°C on the 10th, -12°C on the 15th, and -14°C on the 22nd.
Could you point me in the direction of research that has looked into the phenomena that an early winter at far northern latitudes, begets winter? I believe the principal mechanisms were increased albedo of snow cover, ground insulating properties of snow, and the diminishing heat due to the sun angle in the winter at northern latitudes. Thanks for the blog, I'm a big fan!
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Tracy. We discussed some of these ideas in the following post (and precursor posts)
Deletehttp://ak-wx.blogspot.com/2013/11/temperature-and-snow-cover-part-3.html
When I get a chance I'll look to see if anyone has formally addressed this in the literature.