Winter in Wrangell is likely to be a bit warmer than the nights of yesteryear, though whether there will be a white or just slushy entrance to the spring season is still up in the air.
“They are going with a greater than 40 percent chance that we'll have above-normal temperatures all this winter, and as far as precipitation, there's no real indicator on which way it's going to go,” said Tim Steffen, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau. “These winters are driven by bigger atmospheric circulations, those global scale patterns. We'll see what the weather brings; hopefully we'll see some snow falling soon.”
He added it was slightly more likely that the climactic patterns would shift toward a wetter El Niño year, away from the trend of El Niño Southern Oscillation neutral years, placing a 67 percent chance on the occurrence.
Still, even should the current shift fling tropical moisture to the north, Steffen said there was not an accurate prediction on how much precipitation or snowfall would increase, as “every one of them is different. It does give us some indication on being wetter than normal, dryer than normal.”
So far through 2014, Steffen explained the inner channel area has seen its rainfall increase over historical trends, and fall later in the year, based on a study of the past 30 years of regional climate data and weighted for more recent figures.
“Pretty much, it was a wet summer, all across the panhandle,” he said.
Starting off the year, January saw normal amounts of rain at about 12 inches, but snowfall was down dramatically, 18 inches below normal with a dusting of only 3.7 inches.
February flipped the problem a bit, observing slightly lower than normal snow, but five less inches of rain at a dry two inches over the month.
March saw a turning of the precipitous tables, and as snow petered out for the year, rainfall rose fairly steadily — about five inches up in April, down three in May, and then up again, 2.5 inches and 3.47 inches over the usual five in June and July.
Rainfall peaked with an increase of nearly seven inches in August, doubling historical expectations.
It finally died back down in September with two inches above the normal 13.5 inches of rain.
Temperature-wise, patterns remained much the same through 2014 — the early two months of the year experienced colder weather than normal, minus an aberrantly warm January, leading on through spring and summer seasons that trended about two to three degrees warmer.
Frustratingly for meteorologists, this year's weather wasn't the case last year, which was also dissimilar from the year before that, Steffan added. “Most of the snow fell in November and December, and the rest of the winter was drier (in 2013).”
Yet unseasonable warmth had burnt off nearly all the snow by January, he added. “The year before that was pretty normal, in that there was a fairly even spread of snow throughout the winter.”
Both years were in ENSO neutral states, he said.
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