Weather

An Alaska Airlines flight headed from Juneau to Sitka on Monday morning was struck by lightning just before landing. 

Passenger Kathy Fitzgerald was on board the 27-minute flight. She said the plane was briefly engulfed in a bright orange and gold flash.

“It was like a giant flashbulb going off throughout the whole plane, coming from outside,” she said. “There was this huge, bright light — there was no loud sound, there was no shimmying or shuddering of the plane.” 

In her time flying through Alaska weather, she said she had never experienced anything like it. 

Fitzgerald was originally traveling from Anchorage, where flight 62 originated, back home to Ketchikan with her family. The leg between Juneau and Sitka was part of the milk run, and was supposed to continue to Ketchikan and Seattle.

According to a spokesperson for the airline, lightning strikes are not unusual.

“Our aircraft are designed to dissipate the electrical energy of the lightning bolt without damaging the aircraft systems,” the spokesperson said. 

The plane landed safely in Sitka, and the spokesperson said maintenance technicians were inspecting the aircraft as a precaution. 

The airline eventually cancelled the flight.

Winter has arrived in Southeast Alaska, bringing freezing temperatures and enough snow to break daily records for some communities.

Jeff Garmon is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau.

“I don’t think anybody escapes having to, you know, just make sure that we’re ready for arctic temperatures,” Garmon said. “Typically what’s over in British Columbia, we’re getting. It didn’t stop at the mountains. It decided to come for a visit in Alaska.”

Last weekend, Juneau broke its daily record for Dec. 6 with 9.6 inches of snow, the most snow recorded for that date, according to decades of data maintained by the National Weather Service.

Though there’s no consistent record of snowfall data for Wrangell, the community got over 18 inches of snow earlier this week.

And on Mitkof Island, over 15 inches of snow fell in Petersburg. The town got 7.8 inches on Monday alone, breaking the daily record for Dec. 8 by 3.8 inches. Another 7.5 inches of snow fell on Tuesday, which was a couple inches shy of that date’s daily record — a whopping 9.9 inches that fell during a historic storm in 1946.

Garmon said the average amount of snowfall for a single day is around half an inch.

“It was a significant snowfall,” said Garmon.

Looking ahead, he said freezing temperatures are forecasted throughout the region, and more snow could fall this weekend and early next week.

Juneau saw a snowfall record during a winter storm over the weekend, and now, freezing temperatures and clear skies are expected to stretch through most of this week. 

Juneau received 13.6 inches of snow this past weekend, measured at the Juneau International Airport. The majority, 9.6 inches, fell on Saturday, Dec. 6, breaking the record for that day in history, according to the National Weather Service. The previous record for Dec. 6 was 7.2 inches, set in 1975. 

“It was a fairly common setup for a heavy snow pattern in Juneau,” said Nathan Compton, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau. 

He said the winter storm was caused by cold, dry air flowing south from interior Canada and moving under warmer, moist air traveling north, turning what would have been rain into snow. 

“That cold air came down from Lynn Canal and just undercut everything,” he said. “Right when that happens, that’s when we get the maximum lift. And so on Saturday, that’s why we got those very, very, very heavy snow rates, right at the beginning of the event.”

Elsewhere in the region, the heavy snow and wind caused the Klondike Highway to close over the weekend, and the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry M/V LeConte scheduled to leave Skagway Sunday was cancelled. That stranded the Juneau-Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé Nordic Ski Team in Whitehorse after a ski trip. 

Abby McAllister is the lead ski coach for the team, but wasn’t on the trip. She said 16 students and their coaches stayed an extra night in their AirBnB. 

They’re driving to Haines, where they’ll stay overnight at the local high school and then board the ferry M/V Columbia early Tuesday morning.

Instead of coming home Sunday night, the team is expected back Tuesday. McAllister said the kids know how to go with the flow. 

“You know, it’s Alaska, and these are Alaska kids, and they’ve just been all positive with the twists and turns,” she said. 

Now that the dry, cold air from the north has mostly wrung out the moist clouds hanging over Juneau, sunshine and low temperatures — ranging from the single digits to the teens — are expected to take hold through Friday. 

It was ten below in Fairbanks on Tuesday night. Undeterred, a crowd of people flocked to a popular overlook at the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus to watch for the aurora.

Fatin Pasha stood outside his car shivering, with a fur trapper hat pulled down over his ears. He said he’d just moved to Fairbanks from Missouri, and the lights were part of what brought him here.

But in the early hours of the night, Pasha said he could only see the faintest blush of color in the skies.

“It’s just a tad reddish,” he said. “Not a whole lot, yet. I’ve seen some beautiful pictures, though. So, I’m hanging around in this negative weather, hoping to catch a glimpse.”

At first, it was hard to tell if the faint glow was the aurora, or just a trick of the city lights, the exhaust from our cars, or the fog of our breath. But about a half hour later, the pink haze deepened into scarlet, and pillars of light danced across the sky.

Those same lights were visible all over the country — as far south as the Florida panhandle.

The light show is part of what UAF scientists are calling an unusual series of x-class solar flares that started on Monday, sending out an enormous plasma cloud called a coronal mass ejection, or CME.

The event produced one unsettlingly named “cannibal” ejection, so named because it caught up to and merged with other clouds of plasma.

These x-class flares are the most intense ones — and potentially the most destructive. According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, they can disrupt satellite communications, GPS systems, power grids, and even trigger radio blackouts.

Mark Conde, a space physicist at UAF, said this three-fold hit is one of the most significant solar events he’s observed in his career. The third wave hit at around 11 a.m. on Tuesday, during Conde’s interview with KUAC. He said it disrupted the monitoring systems he was looking at and briefly prevented him from sharing data.

Conde said a smaller storm than this knocked out about 40 SpaceX satellites in February of 2022.

“They were unlucky,” Conde said. “They put them in this low altitude orbit first. And they happened to experience a storm right when the satellites were most vulnerable.”

The predicted speed of the third coronal mass ejection in the series was the highest he’d ever seen: about 870 miles per second. Conde said that although the best auroras were forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday, the lights could continue to shine for the next few days.

“We might get another one or two of these before the solar cycle calms down,” he said. “Then we have to wait another 11 years to get the next one. So the event we’re experiencing right now is certainly not an everyday event by any stretch of the imagination.”

The U.S. Coast Guard commander for Western Alaska compared the devastation in Southwest Alaska villages over the weekend to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“Several of these villages have been completely devastated, absolutely flooded, several feet deep,” Coast Guard Capt. Christopher Culpepper said at a news conference Monday. “This took homes off of foundations. This took people into peril, where folks were swimming, floating, trying to find debris to hold onto in the cover of darkness.”

The remnants of Typhoon Halong barreled into remote, coastal communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta on Sunday, bringing hurricane-force winds and record flood waters. Coast Guard and National Guard crews have rescued at least 51 people so far from two of the hardest-hit communities: Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. Three people remain missing from Kwigillingok. Hundreds of survivors are in community shelters.

“It’s been very scary — very, very scary — for folks,” said State Emergency Operations Center head Mark Roberts.

Roberts and other officials at Monday’s news conference said they’re still taking stock of the damage, but said the storm destroyed dozens of homes. Some of them floated off their foundations with families still inside. Several people called the state’s emergency operations center for help.

“The folks that were in houses that were floating and didn’t know where they were was one of the most tragic things our folks in the state EOC have ever faced,” Roberts said.

The storm also cracked Kipnuk’s runway so planes cannot land and snapped a lot of utility poles in half, leading to continued power outages, Bethel state Sen. Lyman Hoffman said.

Massive search and rescue effort continues

Locating every missing person is the state’s top priority, Roberts said.

Alaska National Guard Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Torrance Saxe said he has activated every member of the state’s National Guard and Alaska State Defense Force living in Western Alaska, totaling 60 to 80 people. State officials are also calling up more personnel largely from Fairbanks and Anchorage, he said.

“This may end up being the largest off-the-road-system response for the National Guard in about 45 years,” Saxe said.

Dozens of nonprofit organizations, businesses and faith-based groups, including the Salvation Army, Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse and World Central Kitchen, are also coordinating recovery efforts with the state, Roberts said.

“We’re coming,” Roberts said. “We’re going to have folks there to help you.”

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has declared a disaster for the region, easing access to additional resources.

“We know you need help. We’re going to continue to get the help to you,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can to get everything up and running as quickly as possible, and we will continue to help — not just today, tomorrow, but weeks and months on and until we get things back to what used to be at least considered semi-normal.”

Record flooding

The storm surge broke records in the hardest hit communities, said meteorologist David Kramer of the National Weather Service. At Kipnuk, the water reached 6.6 feet above the normal highest tide mark, he said.

“The previous record was 4.7 feet, and that was back in 2000. So almost two feet higher than what we have seen before,” Kramer said.

The surge at Kwigillingok was also several feet higher than the last record high water, Kramer said.

Despite its fierceness, this storm was more focused than Merbok, the big disaster that hit Western Alaska in 2022.

“Merbok was, I’ll say, more extended on the coast,” said Gen. Saxe. “This really did hit certain areas very hard, and we want to get our help there, as I said, very quickly.”

Coast Guard assess environmental impacts

In addition to its search and rescue mission, the Coast Guard is also focused on the potential for a marine disaster. By midday, the only pollution reported was a light sheen in the flood waters, but the area of storm damage includes dozens of bulk fuel tanks and other fuel storage facilities, Culpepper said.

“These facilities are those that which the communities rely upon for home heating oil, subsistence through winter, for travel, for fuel, for vehicles, boats, aircraft, and they’re critical assets,” he said.

Coast Guard teams will conduct assessments and decide where the greatest danger is, he said.

Dunleavy said spilled oil is a low priority for the state right now.

“We’ve got to take care of people quickly. We have to take care of their needs quickly,” he said. “We have to take care of water, food, sanitation, electricity.”

Oil and gasoline spills can be addressed later, he said.

‘More and more warming that is disrupting lives’

Dunleavy said he didn’t know how much climate change may have contributed to the intensity of the storm. Alaska has seen big storms in past decades, too, he said.

“We certainly had a couple stacked on top of each other last couple of years,” he said. “At least two under under my watch.”

Hoffman, who represents the region and grew up in Bethel, said its climate has changed, forcing the village of Newtok to relocate.

“There has been more and more warming that is disrupting lives in the Y-K Delta from the last 25 years that I can tell,” he said.

At least three people were still missing Monday, and 51 had been rescued from two Southwest Alaska communities hit hardest by the remnants of Typhoon Halong, according to the Alaska National Guard.

The massive storm flooded communities and destroyed homes Sunday when it slammed into the coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, bringing with it destructive winds and high waters. Officials have said that the hardest hit communities appear to be Kipnuk, Kwigillingok and Napakiak.

In an update Monday, the Guard said rescue teams from multiple agencies searched storm-impacted communities throughout the night. The storm blew and floated at least a dozen houses off of their foundations, some with families still inside.

As of Monday morning, U.S. Coast Guard and Alaska Air and Army National Guard aircraft had rescued 51 people and two dogs from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. Three people were medically evacuated from Kipnuk to Bethel for medical care.

The three people unaccounted for are from Kwigillingok, the Guard said. Additional details were not immediately available Monday. Search efforts continued.

According to the National Weather Service, the wind had mellowed by Monday morning, as the storm moved north into the Beaufort Sea.

Carson Jones, lead forecaster with the Weather Service’s Anchorage office, said weather in the areas hit hardest over the weekend had returned to normal for fall on Alaska’s west coast.

“Kind of isolated rain showers, some snow showers, up farther north into the northwest area there, but throughout the Kuskokwim Delta, we’re mid-40s, light winds and isolated rain showers,” Jones said. “So the weather has calmed down significantly for those communities.”

Monday morning, Jones said, the storm was hitting the North Slope, where Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse were seeing wind gusting up to about 40 miles per hour.

The Guard asked anyone in need of immediate rescue to contact the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center at 907-551-7230. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has scheduled a news conference for 1 p.m. Monday with numerous state and federal officials. It will be live-streamed on the governor’s Facebook page.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.