After mentioning strong winds in Wednesday's post, I thought it would be interesting to look at the top high wind events of recent decades - at least according to ERA5 reanalysis data. I did something similar for the lower 48 the other day, showing that September's Hurricane Helene ranked #5 for area of the contiguous U.S. that experienced hurricane force wind gusts. What are the top events in Alaska's modern history?
The ERA5 data goes back to 1940, although pre-1950 the uncertainty is very high, so we won't look at anything quite that far back. The event with the greatest land area coverage of hurricane force wind gusts (64 knots or higher), based on peak wind speed in a 3-day window, was in early 2000:
This event pops up in the Deep Cold archives, finding a mention as the date with the highest sustained wind speed (58 mph) at Delta Junction airport in the 1998-present ASOS era.
Second on the list since 1950 is a North Slope wind storm at the end of 1951. Hourly observations from Utqiaġvik confirm a peak sustained wind speed of 56 mph (gusts not reported).
Number 3 was in February 1989: the North Slope again. Gusts were measured to 60 knots (69 mph) at Utqiaġvik.
And in fourth place, a more recent event that brought damage and power outages to the Anchorage area:
Events #5-#8 highlight southern and especially southwestern Alaska as a hot spot for these widespread strong wind events - as we might expect with the favored Aleutian storm track.
I'm a little surprised not to see a west coast event in this list; even ex-typhoon Merbok doesn't rank anywhere near the top:
No comments:
Post a Comment