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The cold, cloudy, wet weather has been with Alaskans since May, with a only a few short breaks here and there. Here’s a recent example from the usually warmish Copper River Basin: A rainy day Wednesday in Glennallen (wx data from close-by Gulkana–that’s where the airport and weather station are for the Glennallen area) with a high of only 48F (9C), then some clearing overnight allowing the temperature to drop to 29F (-2C), the coldest spot in the state Thursday morning. That’s right, below freezing in late June.  And it’s the 6th day in a row that the cold spot of the state has been at or below zero Celsius. (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.)

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