Anchorage could see temperatures as low as 25 degrees below zero through the weekend. That’s according to a cold weather advisory issued by the National Weather Service Friday morning.
Temperatures should be coldest Friday and Saturday night, but there have already been some chilly observations around town, Weather Service forecaster Tracen Knopp said.
“We've seen a lot of temperatures between -10 and -20,” Knopp said. “Like right now, Merrill Field is sitting at -15. Same with over on Abbott Road. So just very cool temperatures that we haven't seen in a while.”
The cold weather is due to a large arctic air mass moving down from Interior Alaska, Knopp said.
“Fairbanks is dealing with even colder temperatures,” he said. “And that air mass just got pushed over Southcentral Alaska, and the Cook Inlet region has seen some of it as well.”
While Girdwood and other Turnagain Arm communities should also see colder weather, Knopp said they’ll be partially insulated by warmer ocean temperatures nearby.
The frosty weather increases the risk for frostbite, which Knopp said can occur on unexposed skin within five minutes. Additionally, the colder weather poses a greater risk to unhoused people.
Alexis Johnson is director of strategy with Henning Inc., a contractor that runs one of the city’s homeless shelters on 56th Ave. Normally, she said, the shelter has a capacity of 100 people, but the administration of Mayor Suzanne LaFrance approved an expanded capacity of 150 for the winter.
After a cold snap in early December, that city approved another expansion, Johnson said.
“We have had 200 people for the last, I would say, nine days,” Johnson said Friday. “They knew that January was going to be cold. A lot of the work was done on the front end, rather than kind of being in like a defense mode.”
City officials have also made use of a warming area at the Anchorage Safety Center, near the Anchorage jail.
Thea Agnew Bemben, a special assistant to Mayor LaFrance, said in the past the area was used to hold people who needed to be held involuntarily, like for public intoxication or other behavioral health issues.
“Back in the spring, we started changing that policy so that they could bring people to the Safety Center who were voluntary, so who were willing to be there and needed a safe place to be,” Agnew Bemben said.
There is also expanded warming capacity at the Downtown Transit Center.
Agnew Bemben said the Anchorage Police Department’s HOPE team has been coordinating with the city’s various outreach departments working with unhoused residents.
“They've been really focusing that outreach effort to make sure we're going out and checking with people offering them to come indoors, offering them resources,” Agnew Bemben said. “We've also been coordinating that outreach effort with all of the camp reports that we get.”
Knopp, the forecaster, said the city should start to see above-zero temperatures after Sunday afternoon, as a winter storm in the forecast is expected to bring warmer temperatures, cloud cover and some snow.
