Thick snow continues to blanket Kodiak as the island enters its third day in a row reaching record low temperatures. Lows the last three days have hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit, even dipping to negative 1 early Tuesday morning.
“To get three days in a row, especially in a place like Kodiak that has records going back more than 80 years, that’s pretty impressive,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks. “Certainly, one of the best cold snaps in recent times in Kodiak.”
He attributed the cold snap to a big cold air mass parked over the entire state. In Kodiak, the chilly weather is expected to continue for the next few days, with temperatures rising to above freezing by the end of the week.
Thoman said the last few weeks of cold and heavy snow aren’t unheard of — Kodiak’s lowest on record was negative 16 back in the winter of 1989 — but the weather is unusual given the last several years of warm winters.
“Since 2014, and kind of the Gulf of Alaska Blob, we’ve gotten used to very mild conditions for the most part,” Thoman said.
The “Blob” Thoman referred to is the massive marine heatwave that lifted Pacific ocean temperatures up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit between 2014 and 2016. Abnormally high marine temperatures have a strong impact on coastal weather patterns, especially for island communities like Kodiak or the Aleutians, Thoman said.
This past summer, NOAA discovered a second marine heatwave brewing. But Thoman doesn’t expect this cold snap will have done much to reverse it.
“Gulf Alaska ocean surface temperatures remain above normal,” he said. “And that warmth is not just at the surface that actually extends down into the upper layers of the ocean. It will take more than a couple of weeks of cold weather to to work that out of the ocean.”
Thoman cautioned that while a few weeks of cold might be unusual, it still doesn’t erase the much larger pattern of warming that climate scientists are seeing in Alaska and worldwide. “One week in the course, of a climate of decades, it doesn’t mean much.”
