Objective Comments and Analysis - All Science, No Politics
Primary Author Richard James
2010-2013 Author Rick Thoman
Friday, April 4, 2025
More on Persistence
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Seasonal Persistence
As spring gets under way in Alaska, temperature anomalies tend to become more persistent from week to week and from month to month. What I mean is that colder than average - or warmer than average - weather tends to stick around more in spring than in winter; but winter temperatures are more variable over the course of weeks and months.
The chart below shows some evidence to back up this claim. I've taken the NOAA/NCEI monthly temperatures for Alaska as a whole, removed the 1950-2024 trend, and calculated the month-to-month similarity of departures from normal. The orange columns show the traditional correlation coefficient of adjacent monthly anomalies, and the blue columns show a "persistence index" that I defined here: the index takes a value of 1 if the adjacent monthly anomalies always have the same sign (perfectly persistent), and a value of 0 if the anomalies always reverse sign from month to month (perfectly anti-persistent).
The only pairs of months with fairly strong month-to-month persistence of statewide temperature anomalies are April-May and July-August, although there's a secondary peak of modest correlation in October-November. Month-to-month persistence from November though March is remarkably low.
Looking at weekly data from Fairbanks shows a more prominent peak of persistence in the autumn (early October at a one-week lag), and there's also a clear peak in mid-April. These two peaks are undoubtedly related to the persistent impact of snow cover anomalies: if there's more snow than usual at those transition times, it tends to remain cold, but if snow is lacking, it tends to remain warm.
It's interesting to note a pronounced dip in persistence in early June for Fairbanks, but I can't immediately think of an explanation for that.
In Anchorage we see much more of the late summer persistence that characterizes the statewide temperatures. It's tempting to attribute this to the persistent effect of sea surface temperature anomalies around the western and southern parts of the state, but I'm not sure why the effect would show up more prominently at just that time of year (late July, early August).
The NCEI data for the Cook Inlet climate division confirms July-August as peak season for temperature persistence in the South-Central region, but the correlations are also significantly positive throughout spring and early summer.
Hopefully readers agree that "secondary" climate statistics like this provide interesting nuance and subtle insight into seasonal climate: there's a lot more to climatology than just the progression of normals and averages. The next step in this analysis will be to calculate persistence from the gridded data so that we can examine the spatial distribution for each time of the year.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Late Winter Chill
Clear skies and a cold air mass have produced very chilly overnight temperatures in the past several days across interior and northern Alaska. Some of the coldest readings have come in from the remote (but high quality) CRN sites, including the Selawik NWR (-38°F this morning), the Koyukuk NWR (-35°F), and the Toolik Lake site (-31°F). It was -36°F this morning at the Beaver RAWS on the Yukon Flats, and Anaktuvuk Pass dropped to -33°F at the other end of the elevation spectrum.
Fairbanks airport dropped to -7°F, but this isn't at all noteworthy from a historical standpoint; it is typical to see -20°F at some point in the second half of March.
Here are this morning's lows across the central and northern interior (click to enlarge):
Interestingly, the change of weather pattern has brought significant snow to Anchorage for the first time since autumn. Anchorage saw its least snowy winter (December-February) on record, with a measly 4.6" of snow in those three months, but now they've managed to accumulate 14.6" in the past week. Adding this month's total to October's heavy snow gives a total of 36.1", well over 3 times the amount that fell in November through February.
The following chart illustrates the contribution of November-February to the total seasonal snowfall in the modern Anchorage climate history. Typically about 30% of the seasonal snowfall occurs outside of Nov-Feb, and this ratio has been as low as 11% (1986-87) and as high as 62% (2001-02) in past years. This year the ratio is 78% and the snow season isn't over yet. Note that there's zero correlation between the two sub-totals over the years.
It's a topic for another day, but there is actually a statistically significant downward trend in the contribution of autumn and spring snow to the seasonal total in Anchorage. This is what we would expect if the climate warms, because the autumn and spring temperatures are more marginal for snow. So this winter very much counters the trend, because of the extremely dry winter (from the standpoint of snow - there was rain instead). Last winter was the polar opposite, with only 12% of snowfall outside of Nov-Feb.
Fairbanks sees only slightly more of its seasonal total snowfall in months other than November-February; the average is about 33%. The ratio has ranged from only 7% (2016-17) to 63% (1947-48). Unlike in Anchorage, there is a slight positive correlation between the two sub-totals; but there is no significant trend in the contribution of autumn and spring snowfall in Fairbanks.
Monday, March 10, 2025
February Climate Data
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Winter Warmth and the PDO
Blog posts have been few and far between lately, owing to personal circumstances, but hopefully the pace will improve in the near future. For now I think it's worth highlighting a particularly interesting aspect of this winter in Alaska: the remarkable juxtaposition of far above normal temperatures with a negative PDO phase.
And warm it certainly has been. While February climate data isn't all available yet, Fairbanks and McGrath both had their 3rd warmest winter (Dec-Feb) on record. Winter 2000-01 holds the record at both sites, and they differ on the 2nd warmest (1976-77 in Fairbanks, 2017-18 in McGrath), but both came in at #3 this winter. Here's the time series for Fairbanks:
We (or at least I) tend to think of 1976 as the great climate shift to multi-decadal warmth in Alaska, and that change certainly had a lot to do with the PDO phase shift at the time; here's a paper on that topic:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/18/22/jcli3532.1.xml
If we look at Fairbanks DJF temperatures since 1950 with the PDO phase indicated, we see the predominance of a positive PDO in the 1980s, and we also see that virtually all of the very warmest winters have occurred with a positive PDO phase - until this winter: