Alaska's The Latest Place To Get "Baked" By A Record Heat Wave

People cool off in a lake near Wasila, Alaska during this
record breaking heat wave. Photo by Mark Thiessen/AP

If you like cool summer weather, Anchorage, Alaska is your kind of place.

Normal highs there this time of year are in the mid-60s and lows generally get to the low 50s.

Except this week. Parts of Alaska are having what might turn out to be an unprecedented heat wave, joining a long list of other places to have previously unheard of type heat waves.

Until yesterday the highest temperature on record for any date in Anchorage, Alaska was 85 degrees.  On this year's Fourth of July, Anchorage reached 90 degrees.

To break an all time record by five degrees is really something.  Heat waves - at least some of them - have gotten more extreme in recent years, and this is another example.  It's rare to break an all time record high, and much more rare to break it by such a big margin. And just last month parts of Europe broke record highs by similarly odd, large margins.

For perspective, it was hotter in Anchorage on the Fourth of July than it was in Little Rock, Arkansas and Key West, Florida, though it was more humid in Arkansas and Florida than in Alaska.

It's going to stay hot in much of Alaska for the next week or so, and it's already been off the charts for a week.

The seven-day period ending on Wednesday in Anchorage was the hottest such period on record, with a 67.4 degree average temperature. And that was before the real heat set in yesterday for a what will probably be a week long stay.

Other Alaskan places are hot, too. King Salmon and Kenai, Alaska broke or tied all time high temperature records at 88 degrees. Kodiak, Alaska just had its hottest July day on record, with a reading of 83 degrees. Northway, Alaska hit an all-time high of 92 degrees on June 30.

Last month was the warmest June on record in Anchorage, with a mean temperature of 60.5 degrees. That beat the old record set in 2015 by a whole degree. And talk about the longevity of the southern Alaska warmth! Each of the past 16 months have been warmer than average.

June in Anchorage was also the driest on record, with just 0.06 inches of rain. For perspective, a one-hour rainfall of that magnitude would barely make the pavement wet.

As can imagine, the odd warmth and dryness has been causing lots of problems. Overall, the current young wildfire season in Alaska is only slightly worse than average, but the fires could really get out of hand with the upcoming week of hot, dry weather and lightning strikes.

Plus, the Anchorage area is usually on the moist side, but not this year. So wildfires and the resulting air pollution is hanging around that city much more than usual.

It's not just the air that's hot. Relatively speaking so are many of the oceans and seas along the coast of Alaska.  The northern Bering and southern Chukchi sea water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees warmer than normal. 

The hot water is screwing up fisheries. Also, lots of dead seals are appearing on Alaska's northern and western shores. It's a mess.

The Alaska heat has so far only made occasional forays into central and northern Alaska. June in Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow on the northern tip of Alaska was only a modest 1.4 degrees warmer than normal, but did feature one day that hit 73 degrees, the warmest June reading on record there.

Fairbanks, in central Alaska, definitely had above normal temperatures in June, but it didn't break records. Temperatures in Fairbanks are expected to reach the 80s over the next week to ten days, which is about 10 degrees hotter than normal for this time of year.

The Alaska heat wave was created by a very unusually strong and far north ridge of high pressure parked over the state. It's a similar setup to what caused the record European heat wave last month.

Climate scientists keep tellling us these extreme heat waves are boosted by climate change. Perhaps these heat waves would have occured without climate change, but are being made more intense by all the CO2 we're pumping into the air.

Referencing the Europe heat wave, Columbia University climatologist James Hansen told CBS: "For all practical purposes, the heat wave is caused by human-made global warming."

I suspect the Alaska heat wave has climate change fingerprints all over it, too.

Skeptics point out, correctly, that the jet stream is wavy.  Immediately to the east of the European and Alaskan heat ridges were dips in the jet stream. Under these dips, temperatures were or are cooler than normal.

That's true. But the chilly weather in these jet stream dips wasn't record-breaking, or nearly as far from normal as the temperatures in the core of the heat waves.

Here in Vermont, we will very briefly get into this "dip" in the jet stream on Sunday, when high temperatures will "only" reach the mid and upper 70s. That's just few degrees cooler than normal, and nothing at all unusual for July.