Baked Alaska: Northernmost state has been unusually warm

If you want to escape the cold, should you head to ... Alaska?

While most of the contiguous 48 states endure a hideous deep freeze, Alaska has had an unusually warm start to winter.

Several locations in northern and central Alaska — such as Utqiagvik (Barrow), Bettles, Kotzebue and McGrath — all had their warmest December on record, according to climatologist Brian Brettschneider. Fairbanks had its second-warmest December. Over the first three weeks of the month, the city was a whopping 20 degrees above average.

At midday Tuesday, at 48 degrees, Anchorage’s Merrill Field Airport was warmer than almost the entire contiguous 48 states, including cities such as Jacksonville, Houston, Atlanta and New Orleans.

Anchorage had its fifth-warmest December: an average temperature more than 7 degrees above average.

The exceedingly warm weather in Alaska was related to a large area of high pressure in upper levels of the atmosphere, which dominated much of western North America for most of December, according to weather.com.

Alaska wasn’t just warm in December: Utqiagvik had its second-warmest year on record.

Is the warmth related to climate change? “The state has seen a growing trend of milder temperatures overall through the last few decades,” weather.com meteorologist Chris Dolce said, noting that the past three years rank among the top four warmest years on record in the state.

Utqiagvik is often referenced as an embodiment of rapid Arctic changes, said Deke Arndt, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Monitoring Branch. “In the context of a changing climate, the Arctic is changing more rapidly than the rest of the planet,” he said.