Winter is more or less over in most of Alaska. And if you like that kind of thing — winter, that is — it was pretty decent in much of the state. But climatologist Brian Brettschneider, with our Ask a Climatologist segment said don’t get used to it. He said that “normal” winter was a sweet spot of cold in a much larger bubble of warm.
“Normal is the new below normal,” Brettschneider said.
Even though it felt like an especially cold winter, it was really just slightly below normal for most of the state. But because the last few winters have been record-breakingly warm, it felt colder. And in the far north of the state, it was bizarrely warm.
Brettschneider said part of what’s going on in the northern third of the state is the proximity to warm open water that’s typically covered by sea ice.
“So this year it took a long time for the winter sea ice to move in on the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas and the Bering Sea and for that time period, it released a lot of warmth into the atmosphere,” Brettschneider said.
The entire Arctic Ocean basin experienced the warmest Nov. through March period on record. In fact, the entire Northern Hemisphere experienced the second warmest winter on record. But towns like Anchorage and Juneau were in a “sweet spot” for what felt like a normal winter, Brettschneider said.
“We were surrounded by exceptional warmth. I mean all of northern Russia…record warm; much of the lower 48…record warm,” Brettschneider said. “We were just in one little spot and our perspective, is it seemed like everything’s back to the way it used to be… (and) from our local point of view it looks that way, but the big picture is exceptional warmth is continuing.”
Brettschneider said it’s hard to project even a few months out, much less years out, but it appears that this winter was an exception and not the rule.
“Given the increasing baseline temperatures, it stands to reason that winters will be warmer for the foreseeable future, on average,” Brettschneider said. “We can still have below normal temperatures. I mean January 2012 I believe was the coldest month on record in Alaska. This winter, I think, unfortunately is going to be an exception and when we look back in a few years, we’ll remember fondly that it was a really cold winter even though it turned out to be pretty normal.”
Annie Feidt is the broadcast managing editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach her atafeidt@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Anniehere.
