Wet Weather and Warm Signals

I promised a post on Arctic sea ice conditions, but first a comment is needed on more wet weather across most of western and southwestern Alaska.  NWS estimates indicate over 1.5 inches over a very wide area in the last few days.

McGrath's year-to-date precipitation is now the highest on record at nearly 15 inches.  Normal annual-total precipitation is about 18 inches in McGrath, and the typically wet months of August and September still mostly lie ahead.

Two weeks ago I noted flooding on the Yentna River (a lower tributary of the Susitna), and the gauge near Lake Creek now reports a record-high water level:

With strong low pressure and storminess in the Bering Sea, southerly flow has brought very warm weather to eastern and northern Alaska.  Notably, the Umiat RAWS reached 79°F yesterday.  There are strong signals for more warm weather in the coming weeks, and it will be interesting to see if August could end up warmer than July on a statewide average basis this year.  That hasn't happened since 1977, when August was the second warmest on record (2004 holds the record).

Considering how things have been going in Alaska since last December (see below), a change to persistent warmth would indeed be a major reversal.  It may well signal the emerging influence of the developing record El Niño, which is now shaking up weather and climate patterns all around the globe.

A Few Record Lows

Alaska's Arctic has warmed so much in recent decades that it's now a little newsworthy when a calendar-day record low temperature occurs, and this happened at Utqiaġvik on Thursday: the temperature dropped to 27°F, the lowest on record for July 30.  As a matter of fact, this is the second daily record low this summer; the 24°F on June 28 was also a record.  The previous day (June 27) also tied the daily record lowest maximum temperature (31°F); I posted a few comments on that event here:

https://ak-wx.blogspot.com/2026/06/cold-day-in-utqia.html

A chart of the annual number of daily records (set or tied) illustrates the near-complete absence of record lows in Utqiaġvik in the past 15-20 years, while record high temperatures have been very frequent:

The slight uptick in unusual cold this summer reflects the unusually abundant sea ice in the nearby Arctic waters - a significant change from the pattern of recent years.  Rick Thoman has a post up on this, and I'll follow with a few comments in a subsequent post.

Since I now have a handy computer script to create the daily record chart, below are equivalent charts for Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau.  Note that I'm just using data from the current official climate sites, rather than attempting to splice together a longer period of record from different sites.  Nobody in Fairbanks will be surprised to observe that there haven't been any daily record high temperatures so far this year, whereas there were 6 record lows in March and 3 record low max temps in February.

Anchorage has set or tied record low daily max temperatures in every month this year except April and June.