March Climate Data

Winter 2025-26 is in the books, and it was a memorable one for many in Alaska.  The headline story, of course, was the interior cold - exemplified by the remarkably stubborn valley-level chill in Fairbanks, but experienced also more widely across the central and eastern interior.  The following figure gives a sense of where the cold was really anomalous, as in "colder than any winter in the 1991-2020 climate period":

From this perspective, interior Alaska was the most anomalously cold region on the planet for the 5-month period:

December and March were the really cold months statewide, although January and February were also below normal overall.

With November being milder, the statewide average temperature for November through March was the coldest since 2011-12, but December though March was the coldest since 1971-72.

As in Fairbanks, the greatest superlatives were reserved for March, which was truly extreme.  Six of 13 climate divisions saw their coldest March of record (1925-present), and 3 others were in the top 5 coldest.  This ranks up there with the likes of January 2012 and February 1990 for widespread record-breaking cold.

The reason for the unending supply of bitter cold was a pronounced and highly anomalous ridge over the western Bering Sea, bringing northerly flow to Alaska.  The pattern was very similar for March and for the winter as a whole:

As noted in earlier posts, eastern Bering Sea ice extent reached a record for the satellite era, peaking around March 24:

The dominance of northerly flow produced dry weather for most of the state except the North Slope and Southeast Alaska in March, and the November-March precipitation map also reflects a persistent moisture deficit from western to south-central Alaska:

Snowpack is therefore well below normal in much of south-central Alaska, and especially across the Kenai Peninsula, where the April 1 snow survey reports that many sites are ranking second lowest for snowpack.  However, the eastern interior across to the southern Yukon has well above normal snowpack.

The latest breakup outlook - updated today - highlights an expected return to below-normal temperatures, especially across the eastern interior, and that's not good news.  Unusually thick river ice and unseasonably cool weather point to a delayed breakup that may well be more dynamic (violent) when it finally occurs, especially if the ample snowpack eventually melts out in a hurry.

https://www.weather.gov/media/aprfc/BreakupProducts/ESFAK_ACR_20260410.pdf