Blog Changes

Long-time readers of Deep Cold will know that the blog's authorship has changed over time; I didn't start the blog, but I've been posting semi-regularly since mid-2013, and I've enjoyed just about every minute of it.  There's nothing more fascinating to me than Alaska's weather and climate, and I have no intention of stopping now.  However, I am probably going to post less often in the next couple of months or so, as I try to devote some spare time to writing an article for publication.

As I step back, however, I expect that a new author will begin to contribute occasionally; I've invited Mike Garrison, a long-time reader and commenter, to add his thoughts and analyses on interior and northern Alaska weather and climate.  Mike is an Alaska resident and avid weather enthusiast, and he works with weather and climate data in the course of his professional employment.  I expect we'll see a few words from Mike on the blog soon.

In the meantime, I was asked recently about a chart of Fairbanks temperature percentiles that I showed here last year.  I decided to clean up the chart and create parallel versions for maximum and minimum temperatures; so here they are.  They serve as a useful reference for the climate in Fairbanks.  Many comments could be made, but I'll just point out one feature that stood out to me: the greater variability of daily high temperatures in summer compared to daily low temperatures.  It's clear to even the casual observer that winter temperatures are much more variable than summer temperatures, but this difference is less significant for high temperatures than for low temperatures, and I hadn't quite appreciated this distinction before.  The reason, I believe, is that the presence or absence of clouds and rain in summer makes a bigger difference for high temperatures than for low temperatures.