Warm & Rainy Fall Season

Babara Askoak writes,

We usually had temperatures in the low 15° F range and the river would be frozen with people ice fishing. The past couple years have been warmer than normal contributing to where the river is still flowing ice and with some of the plants still green. We had more rain than the past few years. People have been having the flu longer than usual as well.

Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center Consult:

Eric Holloway, HAS Forecaster writes; For Southwest Alaska, warm autumns have to start with SSTs or Sea Surface Temperatures, which have been persistently been running above normal in the Bering Sea. And SSTs in the Bering Sea have been running above normal, nearly consistently, since the summer of 2013 (see "Seasonal SST Anomaly Plot (August 20th - November 18th, 2017)" below).

I was looking at the gridded average temperature ranks and it looks like you have to go back to Nov of 2011 and 2012 to find some below average temps to an appreciable amount (see " Mean Temperature Percentile" figures below). And 2017 has been pretty warm statewide...The reddish dots indicate much above normal temperatures. This is because of the persistent development of storms coming in from the Bering Sea and pushing warm southwesterly winds across the region (see "Departure from Normal Temperature" figures below).

And lastly I took a peek at our freeze up database, and we don't have that much information at Aniak. There is more information for Bethel, but overall I would say that a normal freeze-up date is somewhere around the middle of October, which sounds like what most people who live on the river remember (see "Kuskokwim River Chart" below). Source: NOAA, National Weather Service Alaska Region, Alaska-Pacific RFC

LEO says:

This observation has been added to a project called Extreme or Unseasonable Weather. This project contains a collection of observations that range from unusually warm or cool seasons, open water in winter, extreme storms, and more. Several observations, in particular, relate to warm fall/winter seasons affecting river and sea ice. Recently, Chuathbaluk residents also reported open water on the Kuskokwim River during November. Other observations of unusual ice freeze/thaw patterns have come from Denali, Nome, Tooksook Bay, and Nulato in 2016. In 2015, similar observations were received from Nome, Anchorage, Iliamna, and from Nanwalek, Kwinhagak, Ruby, and Cordova in 2014. Information on spring river thaw can be found at the National Weather Service, River View site. This observation has been forwarded to National Weather Service members for information on historical freeze dates.