Alaska recorded a record for December 19 nearly 20 degrees

 

 Unusual winter warm weather in Alaska has led to a rise in daily temperatures above 15.5C and torrential rains in part of the year, which is usually associated with severe cold and snow, writes The Guardian.

In the Kodiak Island community, temperatures reached 19.4 degrees Celsius on Sunday, the highest reading ever recorded in Alaska in December, said Rick Toman, a scientist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy. He called it "absurd."

 The new benchmark peak came amid a series of favorable December extremes, Toman said, including 18.3 degrees Celsius at Kodiak Airport, a record 16.6 in the Alaska Peninsula community in Cold Bay and at least eight December days with temperatures above 10 in Aleutian. the city of Unalaska, including the 13.3 reading, which was the warmest Christmas day in Alaska in history.

The most serious immediate consequences for people are probably the huge amounts of rain dumped in inland Alaska, where the Fairbanks area was hit by the fiercest storm in mid-winter since 1937, Toman said.

 December is usually a dry month in the interior of Alaska, as usually the cool air can't hold much moisture. Whatever the humidity, it tends to be "a fluffier mixture because the air is nice and cold," said Toman, who lives in Fairbanks.

But so much snow fell that the roof of the only grocery store in Delta Junction, a town 153 km southeast of Fairbanks, fell on Sunday.

Probably worse, the heavy snowfall was followed by torrential rains that covered the region's settlements with ice, causing massive power outages and closing major roads and offices, as well as the nickname: Icemageddon.

 Alaska's Department of Transportation has warned that roads will remain treacherous for a long time because of the cement-like ice that has formed on them.

"The ice is extremely difficult to remove once it gets stuck on the road. "Although the air temperatures were warm during Icemageddon2021, the roads were in sub-zero temperatures, which caused the ice to stick to the surface," the agency said on Twitter.

Warm, humid mid-winter weather has become more common in Alaska in the past two decades than years ago, a sign of climate change, Toman said. "This is exactly what we expect in a warming world," he said.

 The story is similar elsewhere in the far north, where winter rains have proved insidious to humans and grazing animals, such as caribou and musk oxen, which suffer when the earth's ice covers food sources. Such difficulties are expected to intensify.

A study published last month in the journal Nature Communications predicts an Arctic climate with more winter rains than snow, starting around 2060 or 2070.

Alaska will still have its winter cold - temperatures at Fairbanks are forecast to fall below minus 28 degrees over the weekend - but warm, wet episodes are expected to be more numerous in the future, Toman said.