Warm April More Likely

With just a few days left to submit guesses for the Nenana Ice Classic, breakup prognosticators are pondering the extended-range weather forecast for the next few weeks.  The date of the Tanana River's breakup at Nenana is closely tied to local temperatures in April, so an early breakup will be likely if the unusual warmth of recent weeks and months persists.

Looking quickly at some of the forecast data, CPC's most recent outlook for April shows a slight warm tilt to the temperature probabilities over most of the interior. 

NOAA's CFSv2 model has recently signaled an increasingly pronounced warm anomaly centered over far eastern Russia and the Bering Sea.  The maps below show a progression of April forecasts from oldest at bottom to newest at top.  A few weeks ago it appeared possible that the pattern would favor a cold April in the Tanana valley, but this now seems unlikely.

As an aside, I'm in the middle of a very busy period of travel and work, so blog posts will continue to be thin for a while.