Weather

Last month was unusually rainy across Southeast Alaska and was Juneau’s fourth wettest April on record. 

The capital city saw 6.12 inches of rain across 26 days last month, meaning residents experienced just four dry days.  

Rainfall was more than 2.5 inches above average in Juneau, Sitka and Ketchikan. Yakutat more than doubled its usual precipitation for the month, making this its second rainiest April recorded.

Brian Bezenek, the lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau, said it’s not typical for it to be so soggy this time of year.  

“April tends to be one of our driest months of the year,” he said. 

But areas of low pressure lingered over the Gulf of Alaska throughout the month. 

“That tended to force moisture into the Panhandle from either the southwest or from the south, which generally just brings more rain and more fronts,” Bezenek said. With the mountains pressed against the sea, “we have no way to clear it out,” he said. 

It looks like there won’t be much sunshine to start May off, either. Bezenek said to expect showers through much of next week. 

On the bright side, he reminds us that April showers will bring May flowers. 

“It’s always that way — and the sun is always there, we just can’t see it because of the clouds,” Bezenek said. 

The National Weather Service will issue an official April climate report for Southeast next week. 

Too many of the weather buoys floating in the waters off Alaska are out of service and the federal government should devote more resources to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the interest of marine safety, according to a resolution pending in the Legislature.

The measure, Senate Joint Resolution 12, calls for Congress to “take actions necessary to restore the full functionality,” of the NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center meteorological sites in Alaska, which relay real-time weather information important to mariners.

The resolution calls for the state’s three-member congressional delegation to work to secure federal funding for that NOAA program, even as the Trump administration is slashing NOAA’s workforce and operations. And it points to Alaska’s vast size, harsh weather and heavy reliance on maritime operations.

Sen. Forrest Dunbar, D-Anchorage, the resolution’s sponsor, said Alaskans depend on the weather buoys and the information they provide to a degree that policymakers in the Lower 48 might not appreciate.

“These are serious life safety issues,” he said.

But the resolution is about more than buoys, Dunbar said. It is a defense of a federal agency and federal scientists currently enduring an onslaught of mass firings and budget cuts, he said.

“This is a good argument for preserving National Weather Service and NOAA funding,” Dunbar said, listing one of NOAA’s best-known divisions.

Of the 27 National Data Buoy Center meteorological/ocean stations deployed in Alaska, seven are currently out of service, according to the center.

There is particular concern about outages at a Prince William Sound site called Seal Rocks. The buoy there is supposed to be transmitting critical information about winds, wave heights and other conditions that affect the safety of oil tankers using the Trans Alaska Pipeline System terminal in Valdez.

That Seal Rocks buoy, an important source of weather data for marine-safety studies, has had intermittent outages for several years and is currently out of service.

It is at Hinchinbrook Entrance, the passageway between islands that connects Prince William Sound to the wider Gulf of Alaska. The area from Hinchinbrook Entrance to the Valdez terminal – which includes Blight Reef, site of the1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, is of special concern for tanker safety.  Under post-Exxon Valdez rules, oil tankers are escorted there by safety tugs, and shipments by loaded tankers are stopped when winds exceed 45 knots or waves are above 15 feet at Hinchinbrook Entrance.

The Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, a marine safety watchdog created by Congress after the Exxon Valdez spill, raised concerns about the outages as early as 2018.

Those outages continue.

John Guthrie, the council’s maritime operations project manager, told lawmakers at a recent hearing that the buoy has been operating for only about 35 days during the past year and a half. That hampers the U.S. Coast Guard, he said, because it has to make decisions about tanker traffic based on less-reliable information from more distant buoys, weather forecasts or chance observations by other mariners, he said.

While subsistence fishers, commercial fishers and others on the water depend on the real-time weather information relayed by the buoys, “the Seal Rocks buoy, in particular, is a key component of the oil spill prevention system in Prince William Sound. The risk of another oil spill increases whenever it is not working,” Guthrie said at a March 20 hearing of the Senate Transportation Committee.

Dunbar said the Seal Rocks buoy situation should be compelling.

“Here’s a concrete example where National Weather Service and NOAA funding is absolutely essential to the safety of the environment in Prince William Sound but also to the economy in the state and, frankly, the nation,” he said.

Legislative resolutions do not create laws, but they express lawmakers’ sentiments. Resolutions directed at federal agencies or at Congress, such as the pending resolution on NOAA buoys, are intended to persuade federal policymakers and influence their actions.

The sentiment expressed in SJR 12, however, conflicts with Trump administration policies concerning NOAA and its divisions.

Already, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of NOAA employees around the nation, including many in Alaska. The National Weather Service has lost about 10% of its workforce. Another 1,000 NOAA employees may be fired next. The agency is among those targeted by the administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, which is led by billionaire Elon Musk.

The Trump administration’s objections to NOAA appear to be related to the agency’s work on climate change.

Project 2025, a preelection blueprint for a second Trump administration produced prior to the 2024 election by the conservative Heritage Foundation, cited that work in its conclusion that NOAA “should be broken up and downsized.”

NOAA’s divisions, including the National Weather Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document said.

Though Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 before the November election, many of the plan’s authors have high-level positions in his administration. Those include Russell Vought, director of the Office of Budget and Management, who was Project 2025’s lead author.

Impacts to NOAA of the DOGE-imposed cuts and restrictions go beyond lost jobs and workers.

NOAA just canceled a scientific conference that has been held annually for half a century. The 2025 Global Monitoring Annual Conference would have focused on information about greenhouse gas emissions, carbon cycle feedbacks and other atmospheric science subjects. The 2024 conference was the 52nd held by NOAA.

Senate Joint Resolution 12 was pending in the Senate Rules Committee as of Friday.

Resignations and firings have resulted in the loss of at least 23 Weather Service employees across Alaska, according to a source affiliated with a union for National Weather Service employees. The person, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, noted the job losses came when the agency is already severely understaffed.

“We live in a state with a lot of really dangerous weather, and we’re getting to a point with our staffing where, despite the fact that our meteorologists are very dedicated to the mission, there’s only so much that we can juggle,” the person said in an interview. “We’ve been juggling the responsibilities of a full-staffed office with fewer people for years now, and we’re going to get to a point where we just can’t do everything if this continues.”

The cuts amount to more than 10% of the National Weather Service Alaska Region’s roughly 200-person workforce, according to figures from an Office of Personnel Management database. Taken together with positions that were already unfilled, roughly 30% of the budgeted positions across the state’s Weather Service offices are now vacant, the source said.

A spokesperson with the Weather Service’s National Press Office, Susan Buchanan, said by email that she could not confirm the specific facts in this report but said “you can consider the NWS union a reliable source.”

Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy who spent more than 30 years with the National Weather Service, said the job cuts are already impacting forecasts.

Last month, officials with the agency announced they would indefinitely suspend weather balloon launches from Kotzebue due to staffing issues. Weather balloon stations in Nome and Bethel also saw simultaneous outages in recent days, Thoman said.

The effects went far beyond the volatile Bering Sea region, he said.

“That means that those observations were not available, and that is going to impact every single weather model run in the world,” Thoman said. “Losing those observations means that the quality of those computer models, which all modern forecasting is built on, suffers.”

Weather models depend on a wide variety of observations contributed by organizations across the globe, from surface temperatures and precipitation to satellite measurements of cloud cover. But the three-dimensional view of the atmosphere that weather balloons provide are a key input not only for weather models operated by governments around the world, but also for those operated by private companies, he said.

“Those upper air observations are critical,” he said. When weather balloon sites go offline, models “don’t know what’s going on in this very dynamic part of the world,” he said.

Thoman said he was also concerned about reported cuts at a sister agency maintaining tide and current gauges and nautical charts, the National Ocean Service. Station maintenance has to be done regularly, he said.

“And when it doesn’t, the data quality suffers,” he said.

Across-the-board cuts strike at the heart of the agency’s mission

Roughly 800 newly hired or recently promoted so-called “probationary” employees were fired across the Weather Service’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to a report from the publication Axios last month.

Meteorologists on probation in Alaska were not uniformly fired, the union source said, though forecasters in the agency’s Pathways program for recent graduates were let go. At least two had been with the agency for more than a year. One had served nearly half a decade, the union source said.

“There was an error with this individual’s paperwork, and this individual was fired, along with the rest of the Pathways students,” the source said.

Matthew Eovino, a Weather Service meteorologist in Anchorage, said on social media he was terminated as a result of the federal hiring freeze after more than a year with the agency.

“My conversion was submitted on time, but because of the freeze, it was never processed — leaving me, and many others across the government, unexpectedly out of a job,” he said.

Eovino did not respond to interview requests.

In addition to meteorologists, the source said the lost employees include information technology and electronics staff, administrative assistants and more. Altogether, terminations accounted for at least 10 of the lost Weather Service employees in Alaska, according to the union source. Others, including some employees with institutional knowledge key to the Weather Service’s work, resigned after receiving the so-called “Fork in the Road” email from the Office of Personnel Management offering federal workers what amounts to a buyout.

“I am actually quite worried about our ability to maintain our IT infrastructure because of some of the separations that happened with people taking the Fork,” the source said.

The cuts have “decimated” morale, the source said.

Meteorologists are “dedicated to the mission of protecting life and property. It’s a huge responsibility, but it’s a passion for these people. They take it home with them,” the source said. “They love tracking the weather. It’s their passion, it’s their job, it’s their hobby.”

But “it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on that mission when you’re worried about getting fired — getting an email in your inbox telling you you have an hour to walk out the door,” they said.

Thoman, the climatologist, said he expects the effect of the cutbacks to compound as time goes on.

“You’re going to have fewer people working more,” he said. “You’re going to have burnout. You’re going to have stuff be missed.”

And with fewer people maintaining the dozens of automated weather stations across the state and the networks that connect them, Thoman said he expects data outages like the weather balloon stations in Western Alaska to happen more often and last longer.

Lawmakers raise concerns over impact of Weather Service cuts

Political leaders across the state on both sides of the political aisle raised concerns about the Weather Service cutbacks and defended the agency’s work. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said in a statement that Alaskans from fishermen to firefighters lean heavily on accurate weather forecasts.

“I’m tired of sounding like a broken record, but these cuts will have real consequences for Alaskans. I am definitely bringing this to the administration.” she said.

A spokesperson said Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan “has been fighting against cuts that would undermine Alaskans’ safety or our economy” and said the senator was working to improve aviation safety alongside Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Sullivan’s spokesperson stopped short of criticizing the Weather Service cuts outright. (NOAA and the Weather Service are housed within the Department of Commerce.)

State House Rep. Alyse Galvin, I-Anchorage, who’s been tracking federal firings amid scant information from official sources, said in an interview she’s concerned about the impact the cutbacks could have on public safety, especially in light of a recent avalanche that killed three skiers near Girdwood.

“We do not even appreciate how important these scientists are to us until some tragedy happens,” she said. “Let’s not get there.”

Rep. Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, said in an interview that accurate forecasting was essential to the flow of commerce through Alaska, and that commercial forecasts often don’t reflect reality in the sparsely populated, geographically complex state.

“If you own a tug and barge service, if you own an air service, and you don’t have weather, the most conservative thing to do to protect your asset is not travel,” she said. “That means you’re slowing down goods and services, and that slows down the economy.”

Republican Congressman Nick Begich also called weather data “essential” in a statement, but he said National Weather Service’s “staffing and budget challenges” highlighted the need to leverage third-party data.

“More and more industries are operating through the support of independent forecasting, which continues to advance rapidly with cutting-edge technology and real-time data,” he said.

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint coauthored by Trump budget chief Russell Vought, calls for the breakup of NOAA and for much of the National Weather Service’s work to be privatized. (Notably, the document says the Weather Service “should focus on its data-gathering services,” including things like weather balloon launches and satellite sensing.)

One California startup offering long-duration weather balloons, while mourning the loss of the Kotzebue launch site, offered to provide six months of free data to help the Weather Service fill the gap.

But Thoman, the climatologist, said he was skeptical that private companies could provide comprehensive weather data cost-effectively. The entire Weather Service operates at a cost of roughly $4 per American per year, the Atlantic reported.

“You would be paying an immense amount of money for that,” Thoman said. “Just for what the Weather Service does now at, you know, per capita, a minimal cost for the U.S. taxpayer.”

Have information you want to share about ongoing changes across the federal government? Alaska Public Media’s Eric Stone can be contacted through encrypted communications on Signal at estone.15.

It’s been over a year since a landslide devastated the Wrangell community, killing six people. Last month, geologists presented their work from a visit to the slide over the summer.

Margaret Darrow, a professor of geological engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been studying the landslide with her colleagues. She said their research is still in the works, but they’re inching closer to answers.

“My greatest hope is that whatever we find from this work will be able to tell the community of Wrangell why this slide might have happened, where it happened, where other slides could happen, so that you could use it in community planning,” Darrow said.

So far, they’ve found that the slope held an unusual amount of loose material waiting to be set in motion – and that the muskegs on top of the ridge may have played a role in doing that.

A surprisingly large volume of loose material

Their soil and rock samples are still being processed, but so far the researchers can say that the soil where the landslide happened is unusually loose. It sits on top of glacial sediment, which acts like a barrier against water. That could have been a huge contributor to the slide.

Annette Patton, a geologist at Oregon State University, said there was a surprisingly large volume of the loose material.

“A lot of the hill slopes around Southeast Alaska have really thin soils because it’s just so steep and material can kind of slide right down,” she said. “But part of why this landslide was so large is because there was actually a very anomalously thick layer of very loose material.”

She said the team looked at records of old landslides in the area. They think the 2023 landslide — which took out about 200 trees — happened right below what they think was an older slide.

“We just wanted to show this as an example of the fact that there is a lot of movement and activity that’s happened on this hill slope since the last glacial maximum,” Patton said. “And there’s a lot that we don’t understand about exactly how that might play out.”

She said there was a large storm the day of the landslide of a type known as an atmospheric river, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Southeast Alaska.

“Something notable here is that it wasn’t a really extreme storm,” Patton said. “It had a return period of about one year. So it’s like a big winter storm, but the kind of storm that maybe happens at least once a year.”

But the rainfall monitoring was done only at the airport, 11 miles away from the landslide and at sea level. That monitoring system recorded a little over an inch of rain during the six hours before the slide. Some Wrangell residents said they recorded three inches of rain that day, closer to the slide.

“These are really common types of storms,” Patton said. “Most landslides are triggered by atmospheric rivers here in Southeast Alaska. But not all atmospheric rivers trigger landslides.”

But Patton said there was a lot of water on the slope — and it mobilized all of that loose material.

More than twice as big as any known Wrangell slide

Her colleague, Josh Roering, a professor at the University of Oregon, said that the U.S. Forest Service started paying attention to landslides in the 70s, and a lot of their research came out of Wrangell and Prince of Wales.

“You’re really in the epicenter of a lot of amazing discoveries that have continued to affect how we think about these processes that led to the Forest Service mapping landslides every year across the region,” he said. “The map for Wrangell includes 256 landslides.”

He said it’s helpful to look at all the surrounding landslides in order to contextualize the massive one from 2023.

“It was more than twice as big as the next biggest slide that’s happened on Wrangell,” he said. “This was truly an extreme, anomalous event in terms of size, compared to what has happened here before. So this really led us to ask the question, ‘What is so different about that setting that allowed it to behave so differently?’”

He said they were also able to use the LIDAR data from the State Division of Geological and Geophysical Science. The department surveyed the area months before the landslide happened. The department also surveyed the area after the slide.

Roering said the first thing they noticed was some large ledges, or steps, exposing the bedrock.

“These are really big steps,” he said. “Looking at it from the road does not prepare you for how big they are in person.”

He said the erosion wasn’t consistent throughout the slide — most of it happened at the steep bedrock steps. And they even found living blueberry bushes right below some of those cliffs.

Roering said that implies the slide came down and almost launched from one ledge down to the next — which would only be possible if the soil was liquefied. And that would take an enormous amount of water .

“This field work occurred in August of 2024 so about six, seven months ago, and it was still really, really wet,” he said. “It hadn’t rained in a while, weeks before we were there. Yet there’s still what we call seepage – a lot of drainage from the landscape above the scarp that was coming into this side.”

The muskegs on the ridgetop

Roering said they wanted to know where the water came from, so they used previous LIDAR data to find the path from the top of the ridge to the beginning of the slide.

“As we follow these flow paths, they go up another set of bedrock ledges, and then they get up on top of the ridge,” he said. “We spent a lot of time up here on this ridgetop muskeg, trying to imagine the plumbing system for how this works, how the water goes up and down, how it spills out in some places and not others.”

He said they put in hydrologic sensors that test water levels that will help them understand when and how much water gets channeled down from the ridgetop muskegs. The researchers will get the sensors 14 months after installing them. They’ll see if the water levels remain constant or fluctuate a lot during the time period.

Roering said the muskegs only form here in areas of flat land — not where the ridge is too steep. And they can hold a lot of water and channel it downhill.

“In some ways, having channels to take that water out is a good thing, but in a lot of cases, having channels funnel water to one location where there’s a lot of loose material is obviously a really bad thing,” he said.

Roering wrote in an email that the likelihood of another landslide happening in the same area is low because the scar left behind doesn’t have much material left to be mobilized.

The researchers also gave tips for recognizing when a landslide might be about to happen — like sudden changes in water flow or color. Another indicator would be sound — some have compared it to a falling jet or a tornado. The researchers said that once people hear a landslide, they only have moments to get out of the way.

They also encouraged people to pay attention to weather forecasts, as landslides usually happen during intense rainfall. People can report a landslide on Alaska Landslide Reporter, an app that the state of Alaska recently released.

Juneau is finally seeing some snow this week after a winter that hasn’t gotten nearly as much as usual.

Up at Eaglecrest Ski Area Thursday morning, Holly Harris was glad to squeeze some runs in on a long-awaited heavy snow day.

“It’s filling in fresh so you get fresh tracks every run wherever you go,” she said.

She moved to Juneau from New Zealand in November, and she said she couldn’t pass up coming out today, even if for just a bit.

“I just took a couple of laps,” Harris said. “I’m meant to go to work now.”

But she said she’ll be back bright and early Friday.

The ski area opened the Ptarmigan lift Wednesday, which takes skiers and boarders up to the top of the mountain. There they can access greens, blues and even some double black runs.

Due to a lack of snow so far this winter, Eaglecrest Ski Area has only been able to open one lift until this week — the short Porcupine chairlift that only services the bunny hill.

A recent city meeting outlined some big costs Eaglecrest is facing in the coming years, so selling some lift tickets this week is a welcome relief for the city-run ski area.

Jeff Garmon is a forescastor with the National Weather Service Juneau office. He said January 2025 has seen about a foot less snow than the average Juneau January, according to measurements at the Juneau International Airport.

“And there’s some spots, like Eaglecrest, that maybe significantly more below normal, because they’ve had a lot more rain on the mountain than we’ve had,” Garmon said.

This week’s snowfall will help close the gap, he said. Then, this weekend is slated to be sunny and cold. It should make for some good views from the slopes.

Today, the snowfall meant there wasn’t a lot of visibility on the mountain. But, that didn’t stop Nelson Merrell.

“It is awesome, everyone should come up and enjoy the snow,” he said.

Merrell wasn’t dwelling too much on the late season opening.

“Today is great,” he said with a laugh.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a team of researchers that includes Juneau scientists $990,437 to study glacial outburst flooding from Juneau’s Mendenhall Glacier. 

A glacial outburst flood is caused when a glacial lake releases its water into a river. For the last two years in a row, such flooding has caused significant damage to homes in Juneau. The lake, called Suicide Basin, formed on the side of Mendenhall Glacier. 

University of Alaska Southeast Geophysics Professor Jason Amundson said the research will focus on the basin, glacier and the flow of water into Mendenhall Lake. But he thinks the information they gather will help hydrologists understand the timing and flow of water down the Mendenhall River and into surrounding neighborhoods.

“There’s so much variability from one year to the next, and part of that is that it’s so hard to just observe the basin,” he said. 

Studying the shape of the basin and how it changes could give them a better sense of how much water could be released each year, and potentially how quickly.

He said this work is going to take some time, so it may not help those who want to know what this year’s glacial outburst flood will look like. 

Environmental Science Professor Eran Hood is the other UAS researcher on the team. He and Amundson have been studying the formation of Suicide Basin and its outburst flooding for years. 

“Basically we have not had a lot of funding to work on the Mendenhall outburst flood, largely because, for a decade or so, it was never big enough that it created a serious hazard,” Hood said. “So there was no real sense of urgency in terms of people funding research on it.” 

But now that the flood is causing extensive property damage in Juneau, he said it’s urgent that a larger team is committed to understanding it. 

And that research could influence the formation of local policy. 

“There are a lot of ideas being tossed around in terms of building levees or building walls along the river,” Hood said. “Well, any of those engineering solutions to mitigate the flood hazard will be helped by or informed by any numbers that we can come up with in terms of the potential future flood volumes.”

Hood said that even with the information they have now, it will be easier to predict if other communities near glaciers may see this type of flooding in the future. 

“If we go back in time 30 years — now, and we have the same capacity to model then that we do now, we could have looked at the Suicide Basin there and said, ‘Hey, this is a place where a nice marginal lake is likely to form that could lead to outburst floods.’ Nobody did that,” Hood said. “And so we had no warning of it.”

The five-year grant will allow researchers to understand Suicide Basin’s formation more deeply, how its evolution will impact future glacial outburst events, and what indicators could forecast glacial outburst flooding in other communities.

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Carnegie Mellon University will join the two UAS professors on this project, and the team plans to take on graduate and undergraduate students.