Last month may have been Earth’s hottest July ever recorded — and Alaska wasn’t spared.
Lightning sparked wildfires across the state after a slow start to the fire season. There are now 140 active fires, including one that prompted an evacuation notice near Fairbanks.
“There’s fires distributed all over the place. All around us,” said Craig Eckert, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Fairbanks. “There’s too many to try and describe.”
This time of year usually marks the start of the rainy season for the Interior, which can slow wildfires. But that’s not happening this summer. Weekend forecasts call for highs near 90, and a chinook wind that could spread the fires and dense smoke even further.
“I can feel it in my throat,” Eckert said. “Even inside the building.”
July was hot across most of Alaska, with record-breaking temperatures in some communities.
Utqiaġvik had its hottest month on record. Fairbanks had its second hottest July. And Juneau’s heat lagged only behind July of 2018 and 2019 — two years that were part of a region-wide drought.
That all came during a month of scorching heat across the Lower 48 and much of the globe. Climate specialist Rick Thoman with the University of Alaska Fairbanks said climate change will continue to bring hotter summers.
“These kinds of very high temperatures are going to become more and more common,” Thoman said. “But it’s really unusual to have really warm weather this late in the season.”
Southeast Alaska flirts with drought
In Southeast, temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s over the weekend could approach record highs, though they likely won’t surpass them for most communities. The region is also seeing very dry conditions.
“Across the board, everybody was below their normal precipitation,” said meteorologist Ben Linstid with the National Weather Service Office in Juneau.
Klawock and Yakutat each experienced their driest July on record, while Juneau and Ketchikan each recorded their fourth driest July.
Scientists are still struggling to define drought in an extremely wet region like the Tongass rainforest, but the U.S. drought monitor has flagged “abnormally dry” conditions for Southern portions of Southeast, from Baronoff Island to Petersburg and southward.
“So, not quite to the drought level, but it’s kind of like the alert of the possibility of drought,” Thoman said.
That’s with the exception of one community. Wrangell is now in a moderate drought due to a combination of the dry conditions and the city’s aging infrastructure — the city’s slow-sand filtration plant is slow to treat water supplies, which has limited water availability in dry summers.
Drenching rains out west
Meanwhile, a swath of the state from Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula into the Southwest mainland saw cool temperatures. Anchorage, Kenai and Kodiak each clocked their coolest July since 2012. Across that region and up along the state’s western coast, it was also extremely wet, with some communities measuring as much as 200% more rainfall than normal.
The differences in the weather were largely determined by two opposing fronts. A low pressure system over the south Bering Sea brought consistent heavy storms from the Western Gulf of Alaska across Southwest Alaska, Southcentral and the Kenai Peninsula. Meanwhile, a high pressure system over the Yukon Territory and eastern Interior Alaska kept skies mostly clear with persistent warm temperatures.
Thoman said that the sustained heat — rather than a handful of hot days — is worrisome.
“One hot afternoon, it might be really hot, but it comes and goes,” Thoman said. “When it’s day after day, that’s when we really start to see the environmental impacts.”
In other words, long stretches of warm weather like this are what will drive major ecosystem changes across the state: things like warming oceans and streams, bigger fires that burn longer and melting permafrost.
In the Interior, the worst of the heat is expected to subside late next week. For Southeast, that reprieve may come sooner, with cooler temperatures forecast for early next week.
