Weather

After a cold winter, the month of April turned warmer than normal across the state.

Alaska’s Energy Desk is checking in with climatologist Brian Brettschneider each week as part of the segment, Ask a Climatologist.

Brettschneider says April broke the string of below normal temperatures that dominated the winter months.

Interview Transcript:

Brian: Certainly March was exceptionally cold in Alaska. In April we kind of flipped a switch, so almost every part of the state was above normal. Canada was below normal and Eagle, Alaska was the only station in the state that was below normal and just by a hair. So pretty much above normal coast to coast.

Annie: Are there some places that stand out in terms of how much above normal they were?

Brian: The North Slope and the Northwest part of the state were significantly above normal. Kotzebue was 11 degrees above normal, Nome was ten degrees above normal- those are really, really large departures. And those were the largest for the entire United States, and all of North America, as compared to normal.

Annie: When you’re talking about ten degrees above normal, how shocking is that?

Brian: Ten degrees is a lot. So for example for Kotzebue for April- they should be 13 degrees on average, but they were 24. And 24 is something you would expect for around, say, Fairbanks. So it’s essentially moving the climate  hundreds of miles. It’s not unheard of. Ten degrees above normal for months, especially in the cold season, happens from time to time. In fact, March was ten degrees below normal for some parts of the state. But we’ve seen a lot of these the last few years. And as they start to add up, it’s a troubling sign.

Annie: And what about precipitation for April?

Brian: Well March, April, May — those are the really dry months in Alaska. It’s not uncommon to go an entire month with little or no precipitation and that was certainly the case this month around the state. There were places that didn’t see any precipitation, or next to none. So speaking of Kotzebue again, they only had 5/100ths of an inch (for all of April), up around the North Slope, Barrow, Utqiagvik, they had just a trace of precipitation and the entire state really was below normal.

A major earthquake rocked Southeast Alaska and an area of the Yukon on Monday morning.

The magnitude 6.2 shaker hit at 4:30 a.m. and was centered near the Haines Highway about 55 miles northwest of Skagway, said state seismologist Michael West at the Alaska Earthquake Center in Fairbanks.

“South of Haines Junction on what we believe at this point was the Denali Fault,” he said. “It’s had a vigorous set of aftershocks, several dozen aftershocks as of right now. They’re being felt in Whitehorse. We’re told that the power was out in Whitehorse. We know it was felt strongly in Juneau and throughout Southeast.”

There was a 6.3 aftershock at about 6:18 a.m.

“Reports have been coming in from all over this morning,” West said. “One person indicated in Whitehorse that their Facebook posts were wall-to-wall about the earthquake. We did see a tweet come across from (state Rep.) Scott Kawasaki’s office in Juneau.”

West anticipates damage reports will come in as the initial earthquake was located at a fairly shallow depth and very near the Haines Highway.

Although the epicenter of this morning’s activity is in Canada, it’s important to remember that the Denali Fault spans all the way from mainland Alaska to southeast, West adds.

“Anytime you have an earthquake this size, in magnitude 6 and up, especially if we’ve had a couple of them there’s at least a small chance of related activity on adjoining sections of the fault,” West said. “But we have no reason to suspect that right now.”

A 2002 7.9 magnitude earthquake along the Denali Fault 90 miles south of Fairbanks caused widespread surface disruption, which damaged roads, and caused a section of the Trans Alaska Pipeline to shift.

Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET.

A tornado has injured dozens and killed at least five people in Canton, a small city in the east of Texas Saturday.

Capt. Brian Horton of the Canton Fire Department told reporters late Saturday that numbers were “still coming in,” but there were “maybe five casualties.” The number could rise as search teams expand their operation in the morning, he said.

“We still may have some people that aren’t accounted for,” he said.

Texas Task Force 2 has been sent to help the Canton & Van Zandt areas respond to weather. #txlege @TexasTaskForce2 pic.twitter.com/bBYdI1DS5Z

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 30, 2017

At least 54 people went to hospitals and one person is in critical condition, ETMC Regional Healthcare Systems spokeswoman Rebecca Berkley told The Associated Press.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted that the Texas Task Force 2 search and rescue team had been dispatched to help the city and surrounding Van Zandt County.

The National Weather Service reported multiple tornadoes in northeast Texas Saturday.

Second strong #tornado crossing FM 1256 south of Canton TX earlier, major damage from this one unfortunately #TXwx @NWSFortWorth pic.twitter.com/YI3XvHO8hT

— Sid Smith (@ViciousWeather) April 30, 2017

More damage shots from south of Canton, TX #txwx @NWSFortWorth pic.twitter.com/A7omCLtLUY

— Tornado Trackers (@tornadotrackers) April 30, 2017

Praying for our community. So much was lost. Count your blessings, in seconds it could all be gone. #Tornado #Eustace #Canton #pray4etx #ETX pic.twitter.com/hWsNMwc1bj

— Carrie Jones (@IheartEastTexas) April 30, 2017

People on Twitter captured footage of the tornado.

#Breaking: Major damage in Canton after large tornado touched down 20 minutes ago @GrantJNBC5 is in the @TXThunderTruck assessing the damage pic.twitter.com/xhKlQmffXX

— Cory Smith (@CorySmithNBC5) April 29, 2017

Pictures on social media show crushed cars, destroyed buildings and trees stripped of branches and leaves.

Horton, of the Canton Fire Department, told reporters that a triage has been set up at a high school, the AP reports. He asked for people to stay out of the affected area, “so that our teams can do what they need to do to take care of these people who are in need.”

Midwestern states experienced severe weather as well Saturday, including floods and thunderstorms, NPR’s Newscast reports.

A 72-year-old woman died after she was swept away by flood waters in Missouri, the Missouri State Highway Patrol said. The state reported nearly 100 evacuations and nearly three dozen rescues as of Saturday evening.

In Arkansas, a woman was killed while laying on her couch, when a tree fell through the roof of her mobile home, according to Fox 16 in Little Rock.

Thunderstorms downed power lines in Oklahoma, and the governor there declared a state of emergency, but no deaths had been reported there as of Sunday morning.

The National Weather Service also issued a blizzard warning for parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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 says don’t get used to it. He says that “normal” winter was a sweet spot of cold in a much larger bubble of warm.

“Normal is the new below normal,” he 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.

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, Brettschneider said. “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.”

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, says Brettschneider.

“We were surrounded by exceptional warmth. I mean all of northern Russia…record warm; much of the lower 48…record warm,” he 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 says 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. 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.”

Melissa Griffiths of Douglas walks her dog, Beau, on Sandy Beach, where she has a great view of the Thane avalanche chute across Gastineau Channel.

“I know that the state blasts a howitzer, and I was wondering, who does that and are there specialized skills that you need?” Griffiths asked.

Alaska’s Department of Transportation operates the howitzer to protect Thane, a community of about 60 houses 5 miles south of downtown Juneau.

“The only way to Thane is on Thane Road and we have to drive through some avalanche chutes to get here — and so that’s just a given,” said Larri Irene Spengler, who is active on the board of the Thane Neighborhood Association.

That’s right: one way in and if an avalanche strikes, no way out.

Her husband, Steve Behnke, recalled a February 2009 avalanche that left him stranded in Juneau while his family was home in Thane.

“It makes you real aware of that mountain, ya’ know?” Behnke said. “It just makes it real because so much of the time we just drive back and forth and don’t pay full attention.”

DOT’s solution is gunning down the avalanches before they build up large enough to threaten the road.

On a recent afternoon, a crew is waiting for Juneau’s air traffic control tower to clear the airspace

“Are we gonna shoot?”

“They’re clearing the air … so I guess they’re gonna start now.”

“The last time we got one on our first shot and everyone got all excited and it brought a lot of snow down — after that nothing happened,” said Scott Gray, DOT’s operations superintendent for the Southeast District.

They fire the first shots. Within minutes, the snowpack begins to give way.

“There’s a nice little dump of snow there,” Gray said. “That was a nice one.”

More shots are fired.

Every two minutes the howitzer roars as an artillery shell is lobbed 3 miles across Gastineau Channel.

More snow cascades down. It’s effect is mesmerizing — almost hypnotic.

“It’s kind of interesting to watch,” Gray said. “The powder leaves the air — it’s like a waterfall just coming down — it’s pretty.”

The howitzer has triggered a slide to prevent a a larger, uncontrolled avalanche that could swallow up Thane Road.

A few days later DOT offers a closer look at the howitzer.

Casey Walker is DOT’s maintenance foreman in Juneau. He explains that the howitzer belongs to the U.S. Department of Defense.

“It’s pretty much like a big rifle,” he said. “This is your breach block. The bullet goes in and you close the breach behind it and then your triggering mechanism is just your typical rope pull.”

Military regulations only allow a handful of authorized people near the gun when it’s assembled and loaded.

“It’s a military weapon and we use it for avalanche mitigation strictly, and so they want to make sure that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, number one,” Walker said. “And number two, it is operated and maintained the way that the military expects it to be.”

A master gunner is always part of the DOT firing crew. It takes 10 years to reach that certification.

The rest of the crew are checking each other’s work to make sure the howitzer is sighted accurately to one of 24 pre-selected target points.

“We have a guy on each side of the gun. We plug in the coordinates. We have a guy that loads, he loads the gun and then he double checks everything,” Walker said. “And then the guy on the left-side of the gun triple checks everything and then we do our all-clear and make sure everything’s good to go and fire a round.”

The National Weather Service issued its annual river breakup forecast this week. The forecast calls for a relatively mild breakup arriving about on schedule across Alaska. But what factors determine the timing and severity how it plays out? We put that question to climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

He says snow pack in Feb. and March generally has almost no bearing on river breakup. Instead, it’s closely correlated to temperatures in April and May.

“So we could have a warm winter up through then or a cold winter, all the way through March, but it really doesn’t have much of an influence on what breakup is going to be like and when it’s going to be,” he said. “You really need to focus on April and May temperatures and to a lesser degree what the snow conditions are like going into the month of April.”

So, you could have the coldest winter on record, but a warmer-than-normal April will mean breakup happens fairly quickly. But you could also have a warm winter and a cold April, which would lead to a later breakup.

Breakup is all about temperature.

“When we have sunny conditions and warm temperatures it thaws the ice and it also tends to melt whatever snow pack we have,” Brettschneider said. “So if we do have a thick snow pack, those warm temperatures can melt that snow quickly and send a rush of water into the streams…The temperature also drives the the snow melt, which can push the ice out of the way.

Brettschneider hasn’t used his understanding of spring breakup to play the Nanana Ice Classic, but he does have some forecasting tips:

“Historically, the best predictor of when river breakup is going to be, specifically with the Tanana river in Nenana, is to look at the calendar and look at last year to see when breakup is going to be. And that does better than any other kind of forecast technique. Having said that, last year was a record early breakup; this year will not be a record early breakup, so picking last year’s date would be a losing strategy this year.”