July 18, 2026 - Alaska Extended Outlook

[00:00:05][music] Well, hello there. Welcome back to our once a month extended outlook discussion. Every third Thursday in a month, we get new information from the Climate Prediction Center for the the following month and the following three month season. And we've got all that latest data for you today. So, we're going to talk about where we've been recently, but more importantly, where we're going in the next couple of months. So, first of all, everyone's favorite topic, the amount of daylight that we've had um or the amount of daylight that we've lost now since the summer solstice. And here in Anchorage, it's just over an hour, hour and 10 minutes. Fairbanks is over two hours, two hours and five minutes. Um down here in Juno, almost an hour. And of course, these numbers are piling up at about three, five, and seven minutes per day.

[00:00:57]So, every week we we come back next month, these are going to change a whole lot. Um, but in any event, uh, finally able to get a little bit of sleep at night or a little bit of darkness at night. In fact, Juno, uh, just this week has entered the period where they can actually see a little bit of aurora. It gets dark enough to see aurora at night if it's clear and if the aurora is active. Here in Anchorage, we have to wait till the end of July and in Fairbanks, you got to wait till mid August. Okay. So, how are we doing on our our sunrise? Uh Anchorage about 4:30 in the morning and Fairbanks about 3:30 sunset. Fairbanks is now just prior to midnight for the sunset. They had an interesting occurrence the other day where they had two sunsets in the same day, 12:01 a.m. and 11:58 p.m. Uh that happens one day a year. And of course in late spring they had a day with no sunsets. So of course it all adds up. Um here in Anchorage sunset is a little after 11.

[00:02:02]How we doing for the last couple of months? Now this is an index. This is an anomaly map. It's an index scaled from 0 to 100 on either side of normal. And we've in the last 90 days, we've had about 75 days where there's some level of blue. Uh we bump up every once in a while above normal, but we quickly drop back down. Even the 30-day running average, this black line, has always been in the below normal category. So, so again, some good news here. And here's a more graphical representation of this good news. First half of summer since June 1st. So, summer is 92 days.

[00:02:42]June, July, August, and the first 46 days here is on average 1.3 degrees below normal using station data.

[00:02:52]And only here in Karak and down in Ketchacan do we have above normal conditions. Everywhere else has been at or below normal for the summer period.

[00:03:03]All right, so now let's start looking forward. Let's look at the week two period. So basically the last week of July. How are we looking? Continued below normal. More blue. More good news.

[00:03:16]We have a big trough of low pressure that is forecast to be anchored over the state and that just brings in clouds, below normal temperatures, and increased chances of precipitation. So, as we move into the last part of July and into August for the mainland, it's really the a ramping up of our transition into the fall rainy season.

[00:03:42]And really this year, we've kind of started it a little bit early. It's not unusual to start it in July. We're kind of safely into the rainy season.

[00:03:51]Generally started about July 12th or 13th in much of the mainland. Now that we're showing this as being above normal, this is now climatologically even wetter than we're at right now. So, expect the rain to continue. Now, of course, that's good for forest fires.

[00:04:07]The um the AIC folks have kind of said that we're basically out of the worst part of the fire season. Not that it really ever started uh this year, thank goodness.

[00:04:19]All right, so now let's talk about the next month. Okay, so here is our um Noah seasonal forecast system guidance for the month of August and it's got everyone in some shade of above normal including basically all of Alaska except for the Alaska Peninsula. Um now it doesn't have us as with as high as probabilities above normal as most of the lower 48, but there's really no cool signal anywhere in here. How about our um our friends our our um ensemble from all the uh intera national international uh organizations that produce monthly and seasonal outlooks. It's basically has the same thing. It has above normal probabilities for all of Alaska except for the Alaska Peninsula. Now what's going on there? we have below normal sea surface temperatures kind of ringing Alaska and then in the higharctic we've got um sea ice that's lingering longer than is typical for this time of year.

[00:05:28]Um so it's got a ring of at or below normal temperatures around Alaska, but for the land areas it's showing above normal precipitation. I'm sorry, above normal temperatures. Now, how does this translate to our official forecast? Drum roll.

[00:05:44]It is the official forecast for the month of August from the Climate Prediction Center is above normal for nearly the entire state. And actually, their first draft had above normal going all the way out to the uh to the North Slope. I asked them to dial that back a little bit in deference to the unusually extensive sea ice and the Bowfort and Chuckq seas, but all that guidance showed above normal temperatures. Now, a little bit of a caveat here. This is the week 34 outlook that was issued last week. It was pretty warm and that is the first quarter of the month. So, that was an ingredient that went into that um monthly outlook. The one that just came out the end of this week looked quite a bit different. It really dialed back that warm signal. So, it's entirely possible now that that even though we haven't gone into August, this August outlook may be a little bit overdone. So don't be surprised if this isn't quite as warm really statewide as what we're thinking. Okay. So now how are we doing for precipitation?

[00:07:01]The guidance favors a westerly flow which is typical for August but a more pronounced flow that is our seasonal August wet flow. So August already pretty wet. Now we're thinking it's going to be even wetter. Now this would be a continuation of really what we've seen in most Augusts in the last decade.

[00:07:25]Okay. So if you like the rain, I've got this is a good this is a good map for you. Wet and um now this this is a little bit in in contrast with our temperature. We wouldn't expect there to be above normal temperatures and above normal precipitation.

[00:07:44]So kind of one of them's got to give. My sense is the temperature is probably not going to be this warm and the precipitation is probably more realistic. So let's see. We'll we'll come back in six weeks and see how this how this worked out.

[00:08:04]All right. So now the threemonth outlook. So that's August through October. Let's look at how our models what our models think. And our Noah model looks exactly the same. So it's showing above normal temperatures for the August, September, October period and pretty strongly above normal. Not as much as the lower 48 or Canada though.

[00:08:26]So of all these areas except for the centraliguous US, uh we're kind of the most muted signal for these above normal temperatures. Okay. So now we've got our um our global uh providers, their ensemble, you know, again, Europeans, British, French, Germans, uh Canadians, uh you name it, and Americans. And it has basically a similar pattern where we've got warm everywhere. warm over Alaska or higher warm probabilities with this ring of near normal uh that reflects the cooler than normal sea surface temperatures and higher than normal ice um in the Bowford and Chuck GC's. How does this translate into now our official Climate Prediction Center forecast?

[00:09:16]All right, here we go. August through October and it is warm. Hope you like warm.

[00:09:26]Um because except for the northwest and the west coast, we have increasing warm probabilities for most of the mainland and then pretty high probabilities from Anchorage all the way through all the southeast. So this is going to be our 60 to 70% above normal likelihood. Well, 60 to 70% chance we'll be in that warmest third of the distribution.

[00:09:53]And for precipitation, again, the same as we had for the month of August, although the probability is a little bit lower, but the same basic pattern, uh where we have wet for the western twothirds of the mainland and a dry signal for u for southeast. Now, we're now leaning, again, we're leaning into an El Nino forecast and a strong El Nino forecast.

[00:10:23]We'll talk about that just in a second.

[00:10:25]Um, but the stronger the El Nino, the more likely you are to experience those El Nino impacts.

[00:10:33]Speaking of El Nino, we are in our El Nino advisory once again and again, expect this to continue all the way through the spring. So, we're going to talk about this month after month after month after month. I guarantee it's going to say El Nino advisory for quite a long time. But this is the one from actually July 9th, so a little over a week ago. That comes out once a month as well.

[00:11:01]Here's our latest probability chart. Um, expecting El Nino to peak in October, November, December.

[00:11:11]It is almost certainly going to end up at least in the very strong category.

[00:11:17]That means at least two degrees Celsius above normal in that Nino 3.4 four region and even a 43% chance that we hit the 2.5 threshold which is essentially would set an all-time record. A lot of the um computer models most the computer models are projecting it to easily exceed that value. So the official forecast little bit on the conservative side don't be surprised we come back in a month and that number is bumped even higher as well.

[00:11:52]All right. So, that's what we got this month. Um, if you haven't already, go in and check on this page for the El Nino outlook that we did just a couple days ago. It's got a lot more information on the El Nino. Um, and in a couple two weeks or so, we will do our month of July wrap-up. Uh, and probably May, June, July as well. Some of the uh some of the seasonal stuff as well. Um, but if you've got other questions, comments, drop them in there below. Like and subscribe if you haven't already, and we'll check out we'll check in with you next time. Thanks, everyone.