Freak weather comes to Alaska, which has had an unprecedented summer

One unique aspect of this summer in Alaska has been the humidity, a characteristic not typically associated with life in the state nicknamed the Last Frontier.

The unusually warm waters have helped contribute to record high moisture levels in a number of Alaskan cities. Anchorage, Fairbanks and Bethel had record high atmospheric moisture contents Monday. Brian Brettschneider, an arctic climate researcher, noted on Twitter that on Wednesday, Anchorage’s atmosphere was more humid than that of Corpus Christi, Tex.

Daily lows in Alaska in July ranked higher than any other month since at least 1925 over a very broad area. “That’s due in significant part to comparatively high humidities observed across Alaska,” said Thoman.

An analysis of Anchorage’s temperature data for the past three months reveals that it has been more humid than any other three-month period in recorded history. The average dew point was nearly 55 degrees, at least 3 degrees higher than the previous record from 1979, and a 12 percent increase over the old record.

In fact, data indicates that since 1953, the air in Anchorage has become 20 percent more humid on average. The exceptionally warm air mass has brought with it noticeable humidity, but that doesn’t necessarily mean southern Alaska has seen more rain. In fact, it is dry — the same high pressure dome that’s brought the heat and humidity has been deflecting most storm systems farther north.

The dome of heat that’s been hovering over Alaska is noticeable thousands of feet up in the atmosphere. The warmth has caused the atmosphere to expand vertically, just as a balloon would grow in volume if heated. The 500 millibar level — below which half of the atmosphere’s mass resides — has been running nearly 200 feet higher than normal since May.

One of the most impressive warm air bulges is set to move over the Aleutian Islands this weekend, with the 500 millibar level expected to be more than a quarter mile above normal. That means the heat dome’s 500 millibar level will challenge records for highest 500 millibar heights for many regions in Alaska, a record of interest to meteorologists because it signifies how unusual this air mass really is.

“It is amazing to me we can get heights this high this far north,” said Gene Petrescu of the National Weather Service Scientific Services Division. He predicts the all-time 500 millibar height records at St. Paul and King Salmon, Alaska — both locations from which weather balloons are launched — will “very likely be broken.” For Bethel, Cold Bay and Kodiak, “it will be close,” he said. (As Petrescu predicted, several records have in fact been set on Friday.)

In situations such as this, “the core of the warmth is aloft,” explained Petrescu. The warmth is less pronounced near the surface due to “stable conditions in the lower atmosphere, especially over the ocean.” That’s why most of the upper air records in Alaska occur in August. In some places, it will be as warm a mile up as it is on the ground.

Lightning struck near the North Pole 48 times on Saturday, as rapid Arctic warming continues

On Saturday, 48 lightning discharges were detected within 300 miles of the North Pole, according to the National Weather Service and Vaisala, a private company that operates a worldwide lightning detection network. The bolts — which were the product of towering storm clouds that are more typically seen at lower latitudes — were first noticed by sharp-eyed forecasters at the NWS office in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The thunderstorms at the top of the world struck in the midst of an extreme summer that has featured record-low sea ice levels and much-above-average temperatures across much of the Arctic Ocean, including at the pole itself. In Greenland in late July and early August, an extreme weather event led to record levels of ice melt into the sea, tangibly raising global sea levels. A wildfire has been burning in western Greenland for more than a month, illustrating the unusually dry and warm conditions there.

The polar lightning was so rare that it prompted the Weather Service to issue a public information statement late Saturday, which said in part: “A number of lightning strikes were recorded between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. today within 300 miles of the North Pole.” According to the statement, the strikes hit the surface, which was probably made up of sea ice or areas of open ocean waters mixed with ice, near 85 degrees North, 120 degrees East. “This is about 700 miles north of the Lena River Delta in Siberia.”

“This is one of the furthest north lightning strikes in Alaska forecaster memory,” the NWS stated. The lightning was detected using Vaisala’s Global Lightning Detection network, which has worldwide data going back to 2009. Other sources from NASA, for example, extend lightning information further back in time.

Reached by phone Monday morning, NWS Fairbanks meteorologist Ryan Metzger hesitated to say that lightning so close to the pole has never been seen before, in part because forecasters aren’t always looking there. “I wouldn’t say it’s never happened before, but it’s certainly unusual, and it piqued our attention,” Metzger said.

He said he’s confident that the strikes were not errors in the lightning detection network, which spans the globe, because they tracked along with the clouds’ movements.

The lightning strikes mean that the atmosphere near the pole was unstable enough, with sufficient warm and moist air in the lower atmosphere, to give rise to thunderstorms. The loss of sea ice across the Arctic has led to sea surface temperatures that are much above average for this time of year, which may be contributing to unusually unstable air masses being pushed across the central Arctic Ocean.

Ryan Said, a research scientist for Vaisala who invented the GLD360 network to track lightning worldwide, put the lightning into historical context by searching through its data archives. According to him, between 2012 and 2018, the GLD360 network detected lightning north of 85 degrees just three times. “The maximum number of lightning discharges in any one storm event was 7,” he said. “We typically see 3 or 4 lightning storms north of 80 degrees each summer. We usually detect fewer than 50 discharges in each of these storms.”

There was one instance, on July 20, 2018, that the network caught over 300 lightning discharges north of 80 degrees, he noted.

However, the storms last weekend far exceeded the 2018 event. “For comparison, in the storm last weekend, we observed over three times that number (over 1,000 [discharges]) north of 80 degrees, with 48 discharges north of 85 degrees,” Said said via email.

The vast majority of Earth’s thunderstorms occur at lower latitudes, where the combination of higher temperatures and humidity more easily sparks such weather phenomena. However, as Alaska and other parts of the Arctic have warmed in response to human-caused global climate change, there is evidence that thunderstorms are starting earlier in the year and are extending to areas that didn’t used to see many such events, such as Alaska’s North Slope.

One reason to be cautious about interpreting the lightning as an unprecedented event is that lightning can also occur in intense nontropical storms that affect the Arctic, though no such large and potent storm was present Saturday. This does make the weekend lightning stand out, however.

The Arctic climate has seemingly gone off the rails this summer. There is no longer any sea ice present in Alaskan waters, with Bering Sea ice having melted out beginning in February, and ice in the Chukchi Sea already pulling back hundreds of miles north of the state. Alaska had its hottest month on record in July. Wildfires are burning across the state, and fires in Siberia have sent plumes of dark smoke into the Arctic, where soot particles can land on the ice and snow and speed up melting.

In July alone, the Greenland ice sheet poured 197 billion tons of water into the North Atlantic, which was enough to raise sea levels by 0.5 millimeter, or 0.02 inches, in a one-month time frame. On Aug. 1, Greenland had its biggest single-day melt event on record, with 12.5 billion tons of surface ice lost to the sea.

Across the Arctic, sea ice is at record to near-record low levels for this time of year and is likely to end the melt season with one of the five lowest ice extents on record in the satellite era, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Sea-ice extent is probably the lowest it has been in at least 1,500 years, based on recent research.

Awful.

I visited Alaska three years ago during late September, and was actually uncomfortable in a parka — it was not only warm, but humid. Locals said the climate had changed not just during their lifetimes, but over the last few years. There were days I wished I'd brought shorts.

Still one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, but temperatures close to 80 degrees during what was supposed to be the end of summer was alarming.

It looks like we're actually past the "tipping point."

I don't think that our environment/climate will ever recover.

Salmon is a "keystone species" and it seems, anecdotally at least, that I'm seeing far fewer salmon in the streams on the Katmai live bear cam this year than I usually do. Sometimes I tune in and there are no salmon at all, and the bears aren't as fat as they usually are.

If salmon go, we're fucked. Some Chinook salmon in the US Northwest are already on the endangered species.

It'll probably recover once humans are wiped out or nearly wiped out, R6. But climate has natural changes as well as the man-made ones so we may never see a climate like what we're used to again.

I do suspect we've been past the tipping point for a while now. The last couple of years I've noticed most people don't care about anything important, which is really weird, but I don't think we'll ever create a situation where enough people will care that we can mitigate what's going to happen. I'm only in my 40s so I'm not looking forward to my elderly years with climate crisis and water shortages.

No wonder Trump wants to buy Greenland.

That's a very interesting statement, R9.

Now I'm actually starting to wonder if he knows something that we don't?

This is some scary shit.

Lightning at the North Pole? Unheard of.

We're doomed.

Fake news!

Poor animals.

Humans will figure out how to survive, but the animals won't.