Climate specialist explains Nome’s cold, wet summer
While the Arctic overall had its warmest summer on record, Nome was wet and dreary. Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at UAF’s Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, stopped in Nome for a Strait Science talk last week to help explain why.
The summer of 2023 was the hottest for the entire globe since 1880, and the Arctic was no exception.
“Throwing a dart, chances are you had a really warm summer,” Thoman said. “It was the warmest summer on record from portions of the Yukon all the way to Hudson Bay. Also, portions of the Eastern Russian Arctic were exceptionally warm. The cheese stands alone.”
The cheese in this case is the Nome area. For the six-month period between April and September, the Seward Peninsula was the one area that seemed to experience lower temperatures than normal.
Even though this summer may have felt quite chilly compared to recent years, it was actually the 12th warmest summer since 1950. And the average daily low temperature was the sixth highest on record.
How could that happen if it didn’t feel especially warm?
Thoman explained that nighttime temperatures remained mild, due to all the rain and clouds, helping to bring up that average temperature.
“Having lots of rain tends to suppress the temperature range,” Thoman said. “All that cloudiness kept nights warmer and daytime temperatures down.”
For the Bering Strait region as a whole, it was the third cloudiest summer on record, after 1980 and 2021. It was also the region’s second wettest summer on record, Thoman said. Only 1951 was wetter.
Rain records have been kept at the Nome Airport since 1950, and though this past summer was only the 15th wettest there, it had the greatest number of days with rain.
“In addition to the comparatively high amounts of rain, it rained very often,” Thoman said. “It wasn’t that tremendous amounts of rain came out of the sky every day, it just seemed like it rained every single day.”
Nome had fewer rainy days than normal in June, but from July to September, rain fell on Nome during 62 out of 92 days.
“That is the most on record for any July through September period,” Thoman said. “This very frequent rain of the high number of days with rain is really outstanding.”
Thoman explained that the region’s colder-than-normal spring likely played a role in the chilly summer.
“Very interestingly, for the third consecutive April, we had in historic early 20th century-like cold snap somewhere in Alaska,” Thoman said. “In 2023, it was Western Alaska, in 2021 it was Eastern Interior, in 2022 it was the Central Western Interior.”
The historic cold of April helped the sea ice stick around longer than is now considered normal, which helped keep ocean temperatures cool.
Looking ahead
As winter approaches, Thoman also helped shed light on how El
Niño could influence the region’s climate. During an El Niño winter, small changes in ocean temperature near Hawai’i affect the location of the jet stream and the track of giant tropical thunderstorms.
There have been 16 El Niño winters since 1976, and Thoman looked at the precipitation and temperature data for those past winters. He found that December through February temperatures were higher than normal in 13 of the last 16 El Niño winters. Precipitation had less of a tilt.
“Six of the 16 El Niños had above normal precipitation in western Alaska, and the rest were below normal,” Thoman said.
Then looking at the late winter, from February to April, only three of 16 El Niños had above normal precipitation during that period.
Thoman also showed the sea ice outlook from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
“There’s going to be a large area in the Beaufort Sea where there’s no ice in October—that is a certainty,” Thoman said. Like most previous years over the last decade, there is likely to be open water in the central Bering Sea into the first half of December.
“Frankly, I would be surprised if we had the first ice all the way down past St. Lawrence Island the first half of December,” Thoman said. “That seems unreasonable to me, given that we really want to see the Chukchi Sea freeze up before we really get that ice to push through the Bering Strait and get the St. Lawrence Island.”
Looking back
Thoman was joined in Nome by Caroline Erickson, a researcher who is working with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy as part of the Alaska Fellows Program. Over the next several months, Erickson will be compiling information on historic storms and other events across Alaska. Her goal is to create a two-page fact sheet for each event, listing stats, community impacts and other information that might be useful and accessible to the public.
“As you know, living in Alaska, there’s many, many extreme events that go on here, and we in this project will cover events like wildfires, flooding, coastal storms, erosion,” Erickson said.
But years after such events happen, it’s not always easy to find information about these events.
“Especially out in rural Alaska, Western Alaska, there’s a challenge of data availability and accessibility,” Erickson said. “It’s not that they’re not happening. It’s just that maybe they’re not getting recorded.”
She has been turning to old storm reports, FEMA reports and the archives of the Nugget, among other sources. Erickson encouraged those who are interested in the project and would like to provide feedback about it to get in touch. Her email address is cerickson6@alaska.edu.
Thoman has also been calling attention to major gaps in weather data for the region.
By 2019, the National Weather Service had stopped staffing its offices in hub communities like Nome at a level that would be required to do climate observations like measuring snowfall and snow depth. These measurements can’t be taken by automated systems, and they are crucial to scientists like Thoman who are trying to understand long-term trends in climate.
The National Weather Service and the FAA also operate automatic weather stations at airports across the region. And these are not consistently recording information, largely due to outdated technology and telecommunication outages, Thoman said.
“If and when somebody—somebody being the FAA because these are almost all FAA stations—decides to invest in, say, satellite transmission to these, this problem goes away in one minute,” he said.
Thoman explained that pilots or members the public can still call these stations and get automated information about what the weather is doing at the exact time of their call. But that information is not being consistently recorded.
“Without that getting online, that is lost forever,” Thoman said. “As we all know, in this region, it’s not just what’s happening this second. If you’re a pilot on approach, that’s what matters. But if you’re planning a trip, you want to know not just what it’s doing this very minute, but how’s it been changing? What was it doing overnight? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? And without having that information online, you can’t make that assessment. It’s a public safety issue, in my opinion.”