Sheets of ice line the shore near the skate park this morning. Sitka has had unusually cold temperatures in recent days. The cold snap is forecast to ease up Thursday and rain and temperatures in the 40s are expected over the Christmas weekend. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
With the lowest temperatures in the current cold snap easing, a mix of snow and rain is in the forecast for Sitka for the rest of the week and into the Christmas weekend.
Some snow accumulation is expected Thursday and Friday, but that should turn to rain by the holiday weekend, National Weather Service forecaster Kimberly Vaughan said today.
“You guys in the Sitka area probably will be going to be mostly all rain certainly by Saturday, if not overnight on Friday night into Saturday,” Vaughan said, speaking by phone from her office in Juneau. “It could be, maybe early in the morning, that you might see some slush stuff, some wetter snow potential, but for the most part it looks like it should be mostly rain.”
A ridge of high pressure pushed arctic air southward early this week and caused near-zero conditions across Southeast. But that paradigm will shift late this week as a low pressure front rolls off of the Pacific, Vaughan added.
“We definitely have a low coming up from the Pacific that’s going to bring in that warmer air – you can see it on satellite right now… We’ve had this dome of cold air with the arctic air coming down from the north, and now we’re going to get some warm air,” she said.
But before precipitation transitions to rain, she noted, Sitka might see a few inches of snowfall Thursday and Friday. While Sitka’s climate is regulated by its proximity to the ocean, Vaughan said, much of the rest of Southeast is in for a snowy weekend.
Sitka is “definitely one of the lighter areas, along with the western side of Prince of Wales. Other areas for this storm are looking right now at around four to six inches in the southern Panhandle and potentially to up to a foot in some areas in the north,” the forecaster said.
While Sitka will probably miss most of the snow, parts of Southeast, especially around Hoonah and Gustavus, are likely to receive significant snowfall, a National Weather Service special weather statement says.
“Heavy snowfall is projected to start in the southern Panhandle late Thursday, then spread northward through the Icy Strait corridor Friday into Saturday. Confidence is increasing that portions of the panhandle will see greater than 6 inches of snow in 12 hours with over 12 inches in 24 hours Friday and Saturday,” the bulletin states.
Meanwhile, the co-op weather station northwest of Sitka National Cemetery recorded a low temperature on Tuesday, bottoming out at 9 degrees, three degrees colder than the old record, set in 2008.
It was warmer at the NWS weather station at the airport, where official temperatures for Sitka are recorded. It was 19 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, but the Dec. 20 record there is 10 degrees, recorded in 1955. Sitka’s coldest days in official records were Feb. 16 and 17 in 1948, at minus one degree. The lowest recorded temperature at the airport in December is one degree above zero, National Weather Service records show.
As arctic air engulfed Southeast, stations in Juneau, Haines, Hyder, Gustavus, Thorne Bay and other communities around the region reported record lows Tuesday for that date.
Current forecasts are posted online at forecast.weather.gov, and the National Weather Service also publishes updates on Facebook and Twitter.
