A Few Record Lows

Alaska's Arctic has warmed so much in recent decades that it's a little bit 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.