Climate Change

This winter’s warmer than normal weather could set an Alaska record. National Weather Service Alaska region climate science and services manager Rick Thoman points to a lack of extremely cold temperatures across the state.

“When we look at the whole state, looking at all of the (Federal Aviation Administration) airport stations, the weather service stations,” Thoman said. “The lowest temperature reported so far has been 47 below at Arctic Village and in the past century, Alaska has not had a winter wind, some place didn’t report a temperature of at least 53 below. And almost all winters, somebody gets to at least 55 below.”

Fairbanks lowest temperature so far this winter is 29 below, a December 2015 reading Thoman says just barely eclipses the low mark of another unusually warm Fairbanks winter.

“In 1976-77, the lowest temperature at the Fairbanks airport was 28 below,” said Thoman. “We’ve already been 1 degree lower than that so we won’t have the warmest winter minimum, but this would be, if it holds up, only the second winter in 110 years when it didn’t get to 30 below.”

Thoman notes that the 1976-77 winter was characterized by a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) toward warmer ocean temperatures. He says the recent year’s unusual Northeast Pacific warmth known as “the Blob” has transitioned to a similar condition.

“The blob has grown up into a PDO, and we’re left with still a blob-like looking feature in the northeast Pacific,” Thoman said. “That warm water that had characterized the blob is now extending to a significant depth and so that will take a long time for that to be mixed out and to cool back to normal.”

Thoman says a strong El Nino, which more prominently drove this winter’s weather, is waning but also expected to continue to help keep temperatures above normal across Alaska through the remainder of the winter

President Barack Obama delivered his last budget proposal to Congress on Tuesday morning. It has a picture of Denali on the cover and several big-ticket Alaska items in its pages.

Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor said the budget includes a proposed 10-year, $2 billion coastal climate resilience program to help states and communities adapt to climate change.

“Part of this funding is set aside to address the needs that the president saw firsthand when he visited coastal communities in Alaska that are seeing their homelands eroding into the ocean at a rapid pace,” he said in a phone call with reporters.

Alaska’s share of the climate fund would be $400 million over a decade.

The budget also includes $150 million toward a new $1 billion icebreaker. The White House said the money would complete all planning and design work so ship construction could begin in 2020.

Obama also wants to boost Denali Commission funding to $19 million and, said U.S. Geological Survey boss Suzette Kimball, improve Alaska data collection to create better maps.

“It is particularly critical for Alaska, as many of the existing Alaska topographic maps are as much as 50 years old,” she said.

The budget aims to lower the nation’s carbon emissions, in part by squeezing the oil industry. To fund a greener transportation system, the president is proposing a new per-barrel oil tax of $10.25. (That’s 25 cents higher than what administration officials said it would be last week.) Alaska’s oil industry and congressional delegation call that a terrible idea. The budget would also eliminate tax breaks that save the oil and gas industry more than $2 billion a year.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the oil and gas industry “enjoys many, many tax credits” and has an unfair advantage over alternatives.

“It is not level playing field across the energy landscape, and this budget attempts to make it at least a little more level,” Jewell said.

A president’s budget is only a proposal, but it usually influences how Congress writes spending bills. This year, congressional leaders are harshly critical.

Alaska’s delegation to Congress said they like the icebreaker money, but dislike the oil tax, among other items. In a written statement, Congressman Don Young called the budget frustrating because it identifies problems of great concern to many Alaskans but fails to provide a “genuine path” to solve them. 

Kotzebue Sound is changing and beluga hunters are facing new competition. Researcher Manuel Castellote at the Alaska Fisheries Center placed underwater microphones in the Sound. Instead of belugas, he found the source of the problem — killer whales.

“It turns out when we look at our data what we found was mainly killer whales. So that’s why the project quickly became a killer whale project.”

Things have gotten so bad in Kotzebue Sound that belugas there don’t sing out as much as they do elsewhere. Researchers suspect the belugas are afraid killer whales will find them and eat them.

“… because they know that if they are happy they will hear them and they might be predated. So they try to be silent.”

As in so many areas in the Arctic, changes are happening more quickly than further south. In Kotzebue Sound, the seabirds that used to eat fish have declined while those eating plankton have increased.

A new animation shows how a mass of warm water in the northeast Pacific waxes in the summer and wanes in the winter.

“Most of what we look at is monthly summaries, and it seemed interesting to do it on a daily time scale to see how dynamic its features were, and how they developed and moved over time,” says Tom Wainwright, research fisheries biologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Newport Research Station in Oregon.

To produce the visualization, Wainwright used two years of sea surface temperature data gathered by ships, buoys and satellites to show movement or changes in the strength of The Blob. In places where there were no surface measurements or where cloud cover obscured the ocean, Wainwright said the blended data set interpolated temperatures over time or an area.

Wainwright said a big surprise is the mass of warm water that appeared in Bristol Bay and eastern Bering Sea during the summer of 2014.

“It seemed The Blob spread across the Aleutian (Islands and Alaska) Peninsula and Bristol Bay,” Wainwright said. “Since I work down in Oregon and Washington, I hadn’t really looked at that before. I don’t know how it’s affecting Bristol Bay fisheries.”

Wainwright said he primarily produces short-term salmon forecasts for fisheries managers and long-term modeling for endangered species listings. Salmon are a cold water species that can be stressed when summer temperatures are higher than normal.

“Any periods of warm temperature – at least for the stocks down here – seem to reduce the productivity of salmon,” Wainwright said. “They get very high growth rates when temperatures are warm, but their survival isn’t as good.”

Scientists are meeting this week in Seattle to discuss the effects of The Blob which may have dissipated

Alaskans participated in a Seattle conference over the weekend that focused on Arctic development and climate change.

The Arctic Encounter Symposium also touched on such issues as Arctic security and politics, transportation and shipping, and environmental protections.

Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott said discussions focused on weather and climate issues, moving villages, building ports, and improving water and sewer infrastructure.

Mallott said the concept of building Arctic prosperity really resonated with him during one of the presentations.

“We need to have the opportunity for prosperity wherever Alaskans live,” Mallott said. “Because as Alaska faces a fiscal reality that it does and the Legislature having to act in the 2016 session to close out an almost $4 billion budget gap, it just reminds us again that the opportunity for prosperity in Alaska is at an absolutely critical juncture. The actions that the Alaska Legislature takes during this session will, in many ways I believe, determine Alaska’s opportunity for prosperity at least for the next quarter century.”

Mallott said his own presentation would focus on what could be done once the State of Alaska achieves financial stability.

Also scheduled to attend the third annual Arctic Encounter Symposium were Bethel Rep. Bob Herron, Anchorage Sen. Lesil McGuire, Craig Fleener, the Walker Administration’s Arctic policy advisr, and U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Scientists from the West Coast are gathering in Seattle this week for a conference on a giant mass of warm ocean water that has lingered in the Northeast Pacific for the past two years.

The Blob may finally be dissipating, but its effects may last for years.

Nicholas Bond, a senior scientist at the  Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, says they’ll discuss how The Blob is affecting marine life and climate, and what kind of impact El Niño is having on the warm water anomaly.

“We’ll be able to figure out what some of the effects were, where were the surprises, and so forth,” Bond says. “We plan to figure out what’s going on here because it is a big deal for the ocean and it’s a chance to learn how it all works.”

The first conference on The Blob was held in May in San Diego.

Bond, who also works as a climatologist in Washington, identified the increasing sea surface temperatures starting in October 2013 and coined the nickname The Blob.