Weather

Update | 4:22 p.m.

The National Weather Service has extended its winter storm warning and increased its snow accumulation estimates. The warning is now in effect until 6 a.m. Friday and snow accumulation is now expected at 8 to 16 inches.

Original story | 2:33 p.m.

Six to 10 inches of snow are now forecast to accumulate in Juneau during this storm.

The National Weather Service’s winter storm warning remains in effect until 6 p.m. Thursday for an area that includes Juneau, Hoonah, Tenakee Springs, Pelican and Elfin Cove. The service warns that travel will be hazardous.

As of noon Thursday, a Juneau Police Department dispatcher reported few weather-related incidents.

Meteorologist Edward Liske in the Juneau office said the heaviest snowfall stopped about noon. Another 1 to 3 inches are forecast to fall tonight and that’s expected to taper off Friday morning.

“Yeah, we stay below freezing for at least the next seven days at least,” Liske said. “So looks like that snow is not going to be going away any time soon.”

This morning, the Eaglecrest Ski Area reported 7.2 inches of new snow in the last 48 hours at the base and guaranteed “an amazing powder day.”

The weather phenomenon El Niño may be on its way back. That’s after a weak La Niña system faded out a few months ago. Climatologist Brian Brettschneider says computer models are hinting at El Niño returning in the second half of this year.

“The models right now are predicting a 50 percent chance of an El Niño by this fall,” said Brettschneider.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a done deal, he says, but it’s something to keep a close eye on.

Brettschneider offers a primer for those who may have forgotten exactly what El Niño is and what causes it:

“There’s a lot of complicated interactions, but basically you have a warm pool of water that’s semi-permanent in the western Pacific and you have easterly trade winds that push that water and keep it over there. Those easterly trade winds weaken in an El Niño event and that warm water is able to slosh back into the central and eastern Pacific and that really affects a lot of the global circulation pattern because it facilitates thunderstorm development and the movement of air up, creating low pressure and then where that air has to settle back down, creating high pressure, so these large scale wind and pressure patterns that drive much of the climate of the globe.”

In Alaska, the effects of El Niño are most noticeable (and strong) in the winter, making conditions warmer than normal and usually a little wetter than normal.

The usual interval between El Niño years is around five years, but can range from over two to seven years. So, having another El Niño year after just a weak La Niña in between is not unheard of.

“There has been some research that shows in a warming world that El Niños and super El Niños will become more common,” Brettschneider said. “And the impacts of that will be felt more acutely, particularly in places like Alaska.”

Alaska’s Energy Desk is checking in with climatologist Brian Brettschneider each week as part of the segment, Ask a Climatologist. What do you want to ask?

Alaska’s solar industry lags far behind many other states.

But with prices dropping dramatically around the world, some entrepreneurs see a new opportunity.

One major challenge is simply convincing people that solar works in Alaska — and that, in fact, Alaska might be ideal solar territory.

The newest solar array in Anchorage sits on top of a two-story office building downtown. Climb up a ladder, through a hatch and onto the roof, and there it is: 86 solar panels sitting in several inches of fresh snow.

Stephen Trimble is the founder of Arctic Solar Ventures, the Anchorage start-up that installed this system at 880 H Street. Surveying the roof in a neon yellow jacket with his business logo stitched into the front, he says over the course of the year, this array will produce almost 15 percent of the building’s total electricity needs — and that’s not bad.

“This is a 20,000-square-foot commercial building,” Trimble said, as Chase Christie, the company’s vice president, adds, “Built in the 1970s. Uses a tremendous amount of electricity.”

At a cost of about $100,000, the system will pay for itself in nine to 12 years, Trimble and Christie said. Over 30 years, they estimate it will save the building owner — who in this case is Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz — some $300,000.

That’s the math that’s starting to make solar pencil out in Alaska.

The state doesn’t have the generous local incentives that have helped the industry thrive elsewhere. But in the past few years, Trimble said, costs have dropped so quickly that those incentives are no longer necessary.

It was enough to convince him, at least, to take a leap.

“One day I came home and told my wife (now company vice president Jacqueline Savina) … I said, I think I want to start a solar company in Alaska,” Trimble said. “And she was kind of like, what? That’s crazy.”

That reaction is one of the biggest barriers solar companies face in Alaska, Trimble says: education.

That means educating regulators, who often haven’t dealt with solar before; and educating a workforce in a region with very little experience in solar installation. But above all, it means educating consumers: convincing people that solar is an option in Alaska, a state better known for darkness and cold. And harder yet, convincing them that Alaska might even have some advantages.

Take the installation at 880 H Street. In mid-February, there’s snow on the roof, snow on the roads, snow on the park strip. All that snow is actually a plus, said Erin Whitney of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. She said the spring — especially March and April — can be particularly good months for solar power in Alaska.

“That’s because of the position of the sun as well as the reflection of light from snow surfaces,” Whitney said. “(And) I would actually add to that, cold temperatures, which enhance solar photo-voltaic production.”

Snow and cold: Call them Alaska’s secret solar super powers.

Boosters like to point out the state’s solar potential is comparable to Germany, which is the world leader in solar installations.

Whitney stresses the state isn’t exactly on the edge of a revolution.

“The solar industry is still very nascent in Alaska,” she said.

A recent report from the Solar Foundation ranked Alaska  51st out of 50 states (the list also includes Washington, D.C.) in solar jobs per capita.

The report notes that Alaska solar jobs actually doubled from 2015 to 2016, to a grand total of 64. That’s less than half the number in the next-lowest performer, Wyoming.

And it’s a pretty good shorthand for the solar industry as a whole: it’s growing, but from a very low base.

The two utilities that serve most of Anchorage — Municipal Light & Power and Chugach Electric Association — say solar power represents well under 1 percent of their total generation. But Chugach also said the number of photo-voltaic solar installations in its area more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, for a total of about 70.

For Stephen Trimble and Arctic Solar Ventures, this is a moment of opportunity and risk.

His company hasn’t turned a profit yet — they’re hoping to cross that threshold later this year.

The installation downtown is their biggest system to date.

Trimble and Christie like to keep an eye on it.

“We drive by it a lot, make sure it’s doing good,” Trimble said.

“We hope to see a lot more just like this,” Christie said. “Generating clean energy from your own roof? There’s something very Alaskan about that, I’d say.”

During a normal winter sea ice grows quickly in the Arctic Ocean, filling up nearly the entire ocean basin. This year though, unusually warm weather and storms are keeping the sea ice extent at record lows.

Climatologist Brian Brettschneider says Arctic sea ice is in pretty sad shape.

“Most of the last 200 days, the sea ice has achieved a daily record low,” he said. “So even though it’s still mid-winter or late winter up there, we should expect a lot of growth and we really haven’t seen nearly what we would expect given the time of year.”

There are a number of reasons why sea ice growth has been particularly slow this winter. Very warm temperatures in the high Arctic is an important culprit.

“There have been times when even at the North Pole it’s hit at or above freezing, which is almost unheard of,” Brettschneider said.

He also says that stormy conditions around Iceland and Scandinavia have promoted increased wave action, which disrupts sea ice formation.

“So just a lot of things have come together to slow and, at times, reverse the sea ice growth in winter, which is pretty unprecedented,” he said.

Winter sea ice growth offsets the summer melt. The more ice that build up in winter, the less ice will melt in the summer.

“It is pretty alarming,” Brettschneider said. “There’s been open water not far off the North Slope of Alaska in January and February, which is really astonishing. Over to the east of Greenland, around Svalbard Islands of Norway, I don’t think they’ve had any sea ice and they’ve been above freezing. These are areas that should be locked into ice and should be below zero, so it’s very concerning about where we could end up in the summer melt season.”

Alaska’s Energy Desk is checking in with climatologist Brian Brettschneider each week as part of the segment, Ask a Climatologist. What do you want to ask?

This week we’re responding to a listener who asked: What the fog? Why has there been so much fog in Anchorage this winter?

Anchorage has had a record amount of dense fog this winter. The main culprit is a dramatic temperature inversion between the mountains and the city. On average, it’s been nine degrees warmer on the upper hillside than in town.

Since Dec. 1 Anchorage has seen 26 days of fog with visibility of a quarter mile or less. Climatologist Brian Brettschneider says you have to go back to 1950 to find a winter that comes even close to the number of days with dense fog.

“Looking back through the records, all the way back to 1925, there’s no other winter that has this many days of dense fog,” he said. “There have been winters with more days of fog that maybe wasn’t as dense, particularly 1950, but no winter has been this close in terms of the number of dense fog days.”

There are a couple of things at play, but Brettschneider attributes the fog to strong temperature inversions, where it’s warmer a few thousand feet in the mountains than it is on the valley floor.

“If you look back at weather balloon soundings, you have to go back to 1950 to find a year that has a bigger temperature inversion than 2017 so far,” he said. “When you have a situation like that, the air doesn’t have any buoyancy, it can’t rise. So if you have moisture trapped at the surface that has nowhere to go. You need the cool air aloft or you need some wind to push it out, and we’ve had neither.”

That trapped moisture comes from Cook Inlet. The snow is contributing too.

“We don’t think about snow evaporating, but when we do get snow, some of it evaporates into the air and we do get moisture. So we have this confluence of moisture sources and then we also have high mountains that really trap the moisture in place,” he said.

So as winter warms up with more sunlight, will the fog start to go away?

“You might have noticed in the daytime now there’s less fog. So with the higher sun angle, the sun’s energy is able to warm the surface up and when you warm the air, it’s able to hold more moisture, then you don’t see the fog,” Brettschneider said. “As it cools back down at night, the ability of the air to hold moisture decreases and it saturates.”

So when the sun gets higher in the sky, there is less fog during the day. In December and January, the short days can make fog stick around all day.

Brian Brettschneider is a climatologist in Anchorage who closely tracks Alaska climate data and trends. Alaska’s Energy Desk is checking in with him regularly as part of the segment, Ask a Climatologist. Do you have a question for Brian? Go ahead! Ask him.

Bogoslof Volcano has exploded more than two dozen times since December, but not all eruptions are created equal.

On Friday, for instance, the Aleutian volcano spit ash about 20,000 feet into the air during a brief half-hour blast that dusted Bogoslof Island and not much else.

It was a far cry from last Monday’s eruption.

That event lasted eight hours, spewing ash 35,000 feet high and coating Unalaska — more than 50 miles away — with a fine layer.

Other explosions have produced cloudy plumes of ice and even swallowed up acres of land, reshaping Bogoslof’s geography.

Scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory said the variety of eruption styles largely comes from its status as a submarine volcano.

“Everything that happens out at Bogoslof involves magma and sea water,” said AVO geologist Chris Waythomas.

That’s because most of the volcano is hidden beneath the Bering Sea.

The speck of land sitting above sea level is just the summit, and the vent inside is sometimes above water and sometimes below.

When Bogoslof erupts, it pushes hot magma to the surface. If the vent is above water, the volcano can easily throw ash far and wide. Even if it’s below water, the volcano sometimes explodes with enough force that magma expels all the sea water and still produces a sizeable blast.

But if there’s less energy behind the eruption, Waythomas said the magma meets resistance. It has to explode through the sea water, which suppresses ash or creates water vapor instead.

“When it rises, all the water vapor cools, condenses, and forms ice pellets, which we see as this white, cold cloud extending away from the volcano,” he said.

Waythomas said it’s hard to predict what you’re going to get with Bogoslof — sooty ash or icy vapor, a far-reaching explosion or just a modest plume.

In any case, he thinks it’s safe to say Bogoslof isn’t done yet.

“No indication that it’s slowing down all that much,” he said. “We still think we have a way to go with this.”

That could mean weeks — or even months — of more eruptions. But for Unalaskans, Waythomas said last week’s ash fall should be as bad as it gets.

“It’s hard to imagine this volcano will produce bigger ash clouds than that,” he said. “It wasn’t a lot of ash, but it still caused consternation and a lot of canceled flights, so be ready for that.”

In the last two weeks, PenAir has canceled at least 10 flights to and from the island because of volcanic activity.