Anchorage has seen the windiest June so far in more than 50 years. Is more wind in our future?
Jun. 20—Anchorage saw the windiest first half of June in more than 50 years, a result of an unusually stormy spring in Alaska — but not necessarily a direct reflection of climate change, scientists say.
Between June 1 and June 13, Anchorage logged 13 days where wind speeds topped 30 miles per hour at the airport, the official weather observation spot, according to data provided by Rick Thoman, a climate and weather expert with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.
That's "Unalaska weather," said Thoman, referring to the notoriously windy Aleutian town. "To me, it's excessive."
But it wasn't just June. Taking into consideration a historical change in the way wind speeds were measured, "there is a strong case to be made that this is the windiest May 1-June 14 on record" for readings taken at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport weather recording site, said Michael Lawson, an assistant sea ice meteorologist and general forecaster with the National Weather Service in Anchorage. "Looking at just the first two weeks of June, this is the windiest since 1970."
That the wind blew hard for the first half of June is no surprise to anyone who hiked an exposed Chugach peak, braced against gusts along the sideline of a soccer field or watched the tops of cottonwood trees bend this month.
What's causing such unusually sustained winds? The blustery spring weather has been driven by active storm systems in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, said Lawson. That's unusual for this time of year.
But even a monthslong period of higher than normal wind is not a sign of a lasting shift taking place in Anchorage, Lawson said.
A place's inherent windiness is due to terrain — that's why the Matanuska Valley, with big, broad, flat plains, sees more wind than the Anchorage Bowl. Anchorage's windy weather is "a blip," Lawson said. "But it's certainly not very spring-like."
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From a climate perspective, wind is hard to analyze for change, said Thoman.
The way winds are measured has varied over time. Winds themselves are prone to changing quickly, in just seconds, he said. The methods for monitoring wind at a regional scale don't necessarily match up with the ways people feel wind, Thoman said: People frequently report that the weather seems windier, he said — even when the data doesn't bear that out.
"For most of Alaska, we can't find any significant changes in winds," he said. "But this is one of those things — everyone everywhere says it's getting windier."
It may be, Thoman said, that the way we measure wind needs to change to better capture what people experience, rather than a marker like a high wind gust.
"As a climate scientist, maybe we're not looking at this in the way people are experiencing," he said. "We may be talking apples and hamburgers there."
