Climate Watch

By Rick Thoman Alaska Climate Specialist Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy International Arctic Research Center/University of Alaska Fairbanks

With winter now knocking at the door, it’s a good time to look back at the ocean climate this past warm season.

We started off May with much more sea ice than most recent years thanks to the very cold April, and this impacted ocean temperatures for a couple of months, with nearly the entire region seeing cooler than normal ocean temperatures for May and June.

Thereafter, despite all the clouds and frequent rain, ocean temperatures the rest of the season were near or even a bit above normal.

For May through October overall, ocean surface temperatures were generally close to normal in Norton Sound and through the Bering Strait but a bit cooler than normal from King Island and the east side of St. Lawrence Island south to Nunivak and St. Matthew Islands.

The area northwest of the Bering Strait and north of the Chukotka coast was also cooler than average due to sea ice that persisted there, in low amounts, into August.

No area in the region was far above normal, but the southwest Bering Sea, Kotzebue Sound and a small area off the Yukon delta were 1°F to 3°F warmer than normal for the six months.

In the Bering Sea this is in line with findings from the NOAA RACE Division trawl survey this past summer, which found Bering Sea bottom temperatures similar to 2022. In the offshore Nome area, ocean surface temperatures this year were slightly lower than 2022 and slightly higher than 2021, but significantly cooler than the very warm 2016 to 2019 summers. However, in a measure of just how much temperatures in the northern Bering Sea have increased over the past 40 years, while this year was not unusual compared to recent years, the same average sea surface temperature prior to 2014 would have ranked as near record warm.