Climate Watch

The year 2020 brought plenty of notable weather and climate highlights for Nome, but unlike the year before, some of them were not related to excessive warmth or heavy precipitation. Not that there wasn’t some of that in 2020, but the year started off on the cold side. February, with an average temperature of - 1.8°F was the coldest month since February 2013.

A change in the weather pattern started in mid-March brought copious rain and snow.

April wound up with nearly two and a half inches of rain and melted snow, enough to be the soggiest April in 113 years of climate observations, and this included record breaking rainfall at mid-month.

May was mild from start to finish and was by far the warmest on record. This included a thunderstorm on the evening of May 31, the first May thunder in 15 years.

The second half of summer was quite dry, including the lowest rainfall in August in more than a decade.

Autumn was notable for sustained warmth and sea ice did not form until the second week of December.

For the year, the average temperature at Nome Airport of 29.4°F was just over 2°F above the 1981 to 2010 average, and total precipitation was 18.12

inches, 8 percent above the 30year average of 16.8 inches.

The highest temperature was 74°F on June 20 and the lowest temperature -34°F on February 7.

Sea ice in Norton Sound and the northern Bering Sea was in better shape in the late winter and spring than in 2018 or 2019, and some ice persisted well offshore of Nome into the first week in June. During the summer, sea surface temperatures were mostly above normal but not to the levels of 2019. Nonetheless, the ocean was warm enough to delay freeze-up in November in eastern Norton Sound and December for most unprotected coastlines west of Cape Darby.