Despite a strong start to the winter season, Southcentral Alaska experienced significantly less snowfall than usual in December, leading to a surprising turn of events. While the state received above-average precipitation overall throughout the year, the warm temperatures and shifting atmospheric patterns brought mainly rain instead of snow last month.
A bed of snow just barely covers a field of grass near University Lake in Anchorage on Friday, Dec. 27, 2024. A dismal amount of snow fell on Southcentral Alaska last month. But if you look over the whole year, the state actually saw more precipitation than normal, much of it in the summer. As part of our Ask a Climatologist segment, National Weather Service climate researcher Brain Brettschneider says the low December snowfall was a bit of a surprise.
Below is the transcript of an interview with Brettschneider on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Who would have guessed? After the end of October we were, I think, a top five snowfall season to date. But now, as we stand here at the end of the year, we're about 6 or 7 inches below normal for the season. So it's been quite a turn of events. It stopped snowing. (laughs) The pattern changed. The overall flow of the atmosphere brought in warm temperatures and the flow is not really good for precipitation in Southcentral. So like, even if you look in here in December, almost 40% of our precipitation has been liquid rain. And, you know, that's not very common for the month of December. Yeah, I noticed it kind of looked like breakup season for a good chunk of December, and the roads looked like, you know, you're driving on the moon. I'm curious, while snowfall has been low, have temperatures also been kind of higher than normal? I know that there's not a direct correlation. Again, this is a great example of how we try to make extrapolations early in the season; we’re often prone to wild errors. So November was pretty cool statewide. And you know, we were still doing pretty good on snowfall, but December has really flipped a switch. So we're going to end up with a top 10 warmest December statewide
SNOWFALL ALASKA DECEMBER PRECIPITATION CLIMATE
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