High water around Kotzebue

Observation by Jimmy Evak

Our waterways are usually mostly frozen by now but lack of ice cover is causing high water around Kotzebue.

LEO Says

Weather around Alaska in November has seen extreme precipitation, falling mostly as snow in South Central Alaska, and above normal temperatures above the Arctic Circle. Traveling has been limited by varying ice conditions in the Northwest and extra caution must be taking during this time of year while subsistence hunting and/or traveling. See observer Jimmy Evak's photos below of ice overflow in the Kotzebue Sound. El Nino conditions were predicted but this might not be the case in November for Alaska. Rick Thoman from the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy shares his insight with the varying weather and ice. Check out more information from NOAA about El Nino/La Nina and UAF's SNAP's climate data in the links in sidebar. L. Flora

Consult by Rick Thoman

This is the first autumn since 2017 when there's been a near complete absence of sea ice in Kotzebue Sound in mid-November. Although temperatures have been above normal (Kotzebue average temperature was 4.1F above normal the first half of November), it's been more the timing of storminess that has kept ice from growing. The mild weather and storms the last week in October melted out the sea ice that had formed in mid-October, and then again mid-November storminess reduced what little ice had formed in the more seasonable temperatures in early November.

While we often have to be a bit cautious about attributing individual weather events to larger scale drivers, this time we can say definitively say that none of the unusual weather in Alaska this autumn has any connection to El Niño, as early November thunderstorms in the equatorial have been focused over the western Pacific, which is a normal or even La Niña pattern rather than El Niño, which would favor those big tropical thunderstorms east of the dateline.