Update, 9 a.m. Tuesday: Juneau has officially broken its snowfall record.
The city reached 201.2 inches at the Juneau International Airport at midnight, surpassing the previous record of 197.9 inches set in the winter of 2006-07. Snowfall has been recorded at the airport since 1943.
Original story:
Juneau broke its local record for snowiest March on Sunday with 63.8 inches, and now, the capital city is just 1.2 inches away from beating its winter snowfall record.
This March broke the previous record of 62.7 inches set in 2007.
But Juneau has not yet broken its winter snowfall record after a data correction lag in a national database moved the goalpost. Juneau International Airport reached 196.8 inches today at 1:30 p.m., the National Weather Service told KTOO, surpassing what the national database had logged as the record: 194.3 inches set in the winter of 1964-65.
But Aaron Jacobs, the senior service hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau, said the actual all-time record was set in the winter of 2006-2007 at 197.9 inches.
Jacobs said there were 7.5 inches missing from the national database for February 2007 and that the local forecast office has been working for years to correct the discrepancy with the National Centers for Environmental Information, a division of NOAA that manages the data.
The reason it’s taken so long to correct is that the local Weather Service office didn’t receive the right values in an official document, called an F-6, from the Juneau International Airport observer, who had logged trace amounts of snowfall for some dates and marked those dates as “T.” But meteorologists at the time knew measurable snow had fallen, spoke with the observer and corrected the values.
Jacobs said that human errors happen from time to time.
“We look back to see how things make sense, and then try to correct them if we have the information,” he said.
So this winter still sits in second place with 1.2 inches left to break the record.
Jacobs said that since it looks likely Juneau will break the snowfall record soon, there’s been more pressure to get the true values published. He said the correction should be reflected in the national database next month.
Snowfall has been recorded most consistently at the airport since 1943, which is why the Weather Service uses the station as the official climate site for Juneau.
“We need a human to actually take that information and so there’s not very many climate records for snow across the region,” Jacobs said.
But other parts of town with shorter or more spotty historical records have shattered the airport record in the past. Downtown Juneau reached 246.3 inches in the winter of 1917-1918 — before the airport weather station was set up — and the National Weather Service office in Mendenhall Valley measured 222.6 inches in the winter of 2006-2007.
Nicole Ferrin, the warning coordination meteorologist for the Weather Service in Juneau, said a polar air mass over the northern panhandle is the main reason the city has seen so much snow this season.
“The pattern has been our cold, Arctic outflow being more prevalent and stronger this year than other years — so keeping the rain-snow line south of Juneau versus hovering back and forth over us, like we see more often,” Ferrin said.
Although March brought consistent snow showers, short lulls in between have allowed plows to keep up. But the winter started with a storm in late December into January that dumped four feet of snow on the capital city in as many days. Roofs collapsed, boats sank and the city ran out of places to dump all of the snow plowed from the roads, causing the city and tribal governments to declare an emergency.
It was the second snowiest December on record, coming in at 82 inches. January warmed up and snowfall slowed down, with 21.1 inches in total. February cooled off again and brought 27.9 inches of snow.
Periods of warmth and rain have caused snow to melt periodically. The snow depth on the ground at the airport was 18 inches as of March 22.
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