williwaw.com

Driving in winter in Alaska can be interesting, to put it mildly. Driving around town is included in this statement but is certainly not like hitting the open highway, crossing vast, unpopulated areas and ascending and descending mountain passes while dealing with any combination of snow, ice, fog, white-out*, wind, extreme cold, long darkness or blinding sunlight. I would not want to miss this kind of adventure, though I approach it with due respect and sometimes apprehension. (*a white-out is a low contrast condition that makes it very difficult to judge distances, to see where the sky ends and ground begins, and to see ups and downs that might be ahead of you. Obviously not good for driving. In the photo below, the visibility is limited, but you can see the road for a ways and the poles on either side, put there for just this reason.)

Haines Highway, near the summit, with drifting snow, low visibility. Difficult, but drivable. The poles on either side of the road really help.

Since the winter weather has the potential to put a complete halt to highway travel, having an accurate forecast well in advance of a trip could save much time, money, missed opportunities, or worse. I consider this one of the most important uses of weather forecasting. Is the state of the art up to the task? (more…)

Not all of Alaska is in the rainiest time of the year right now, but the southeast arm of the state, also variously known as the panhandle, the Inside Passage, the Banana Belt, or just plain Southeast sure is. In fact, I like the term rain coast. Farther north the rainiest time tends to be earlier in the year. With a few exceptions, the wettest month in Southeast is October, in Southcentral and the Interior it is September or August and along the north coast and most of the Bering Strait and Bering Sea coasts it is consistently August. The southwest coast and Aleutian Islands don’t show as clearly defined wettest month but there is no doubt that September through December or January is the wet time. These graphs illustrate. The green line is the precipitation, the others temperature. Note that the scales are the not the same on all graphs. The precipitation scale (on the right) is the same for all but Ketchikan, where it had to be expanded upward to handle the larger amounts. The temperature scales are less consistent.  (that’s what you get when you borrow your graphs…these borrowed from the Western Regional Climate Center.)

  (more…)