Climate Watch

By Rick Thoman Alaska Climate Specialist Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy

Thanksgiving Day celebration is an old American tradition and has been a national holiday since the Civil War era, but unlike many holidays, the date of Thanksgiving during the past century has never been fixed. In the past century it has varied between November 20and November 30.

Over the past 50 years in Nome, the average high temperature has been 18°F and the average low was 5°F. The majority of Thanksgiving

Days have at least had a little new snow. Of course, there have been extremes. Perhaps the stormiest Thanksgiving Day in western Alaska was in 2003. Blizzard conditions were widespread along the coast west of Elim in the morning, with top wind gusts of 53 mph at Nome, 58 mph at Golovin and 61 mph at Gambell.

Thanksgiving has only rarely brought above freezing temperatures to the region. At Nome, the high of 37°F in 1943 stands as the mildest Thanksgiving of record, and White Mountain hit 40°F that day.

The coldest Thanksgiving was easily in 1963, when the high temperature at Nome was -10°F and Unalakleet dropped to -24°F.

Snow cover is often still fairly thin but not always. Snow depths at Nome in excess of 18 inches were reported on Thanksgiving 1948, 1994 and 1997. In contrast, Nome reported no snow at all on the ground for Thanksgiving 2001 and about once a decade snow cover is just patchy. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no trend at all toward milder Thanksgiving Days in Nome over the past 114 years, and in fact 2021 is quite likely to bring Nome the coldest Thanksgiving since the 1990s.