Alaska’s largest city breaks seasonal snow record
By RACHEL D’ORO | Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A spring snowfall has broken the nearly 60-year-old seasonal snow record of Alaska’s largest city.
Inundated with nearly double the snow they’re used to, Anchorage residents have been expecting to see this season’s snowfall surpass the record of 132.6 inches set in the winter of 1954-55.
The 3.4 inches that fell by Saturday afternoon brings the total to 133.6 inches. National Weather Service meteorologist Shaun Baines said forecasters don’t expect more than an inch of additional accumulation.
Before a dumping of wet snow Friday, none had fallen since mid-March, and the seasonal measure hovered at 129.4 inches, or nearly 11 feet. The halt gave residents a chance to clear their snow-laden roofs and city crews an opportunity to widen streets squeezed by mountains of snow.
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I had to laugh at this juxtaposition in the story though:
Extreme weather has hit not only Alaska. It’s also struck the lower 48, where the first three months of 2012 has seen twice the normal number of tornadoes and one of the warmest winters on record.
Full story here
Nice to see a healthy turnout from local neighbors. Who knew WUWT was so popular in Alaska?
Snowfall this year in Anchorage was about double our yearly average. Homeowners are looking with no small amount of interest at the rate of melt. Too fast, and some of us will end up with water in crawl spaces under our homes. There are a lot of homes with sump pumps already. Local plumbers may have a lot of business this summer. We were fortunate not to have a major quake with so much snow on the roofs.
The other fallout is water depth in local streams and rivers this summer. Record snow depth = more runoff than normal during the summer = deeper water for chasing salmon in. We lose a few fishermen every year due to fast, very cold water, and chest waders. Deeper water means a more exciting fishing experience. Bring your inflatable life vest.
The last time this happened 2003 – 2004 (113.8″) the largest snow dumps hung around until mid August. Some of us referred to one in south Anchorage as the O’Malley Glacier. The sun is out. Should be a lot of melting today. Cheers –
This is rotten snow. Nothing to see here, move along and pay your pollution taxes.
@ur momisugly jones
Welcome to the light side.
Commiserations on your conversion; it is indeed a traumatic process. Sadly, no one side of an issue has a monopoly on hypocrites or idiots. “There is no proposition, no matter how simple, clear and obviously true, that nevertheless won’t somewhere have an idiot supporting it.”
Continue to judge on the basis of facts. Be aware that no-one has all the facts. Every judgment is conditional, but that does not absolve you from the need to make rational judgments. Robert Heinlein wrote words to the effect of “A fact is something that has happened. Everything else, no matter how well supported by argument, evidence or computer models, is opinion.”
My own (lukewarmer) opinion is that the threat of CAGW is as vastly overstated as ‘Peak Oil’ or Ehrlich’s population callapse by 2000. Remember the calls for Zero Population Growth in the 1970’s?
However, intellectual honesty compels us to keep revisiting the issues, despite having formed a judgement. Intellectual honesty, self interest and altruism all combine to oblige us to stand against the political activism of those who hold the contrary view.
It’s nice to have you onboard.
The recent tendency toward locked-in high and low pressure areas deserves serious research, including investigations of how to get the jet stream sliding when it locks. Is this just part of the 34-year cycle, or is there something new happening?
Unfortunately all the available money is still going to the Carbon Cult, and in most countries the money is just about gone.
It’s a new ice age, clearly, brought about by global warming, a.k.a. climate holocaust. Ocean circulation that brings warm air up to the Northern Hemisphere has completely shut down. This white snowing stuff, it’s difficult to say how deep it is precisely. The camera just can’t focus in this low light. It’s dark. We didn’t have tremendous hurricane force winds, but that is of little consequence, because everything is buried and the sun has been shut down. Normally the sun would be about twenty degrees above the horizon, and everything would be bright, but, as you can see, that is far from the case. I’ve tried to get the snow blower working earlier, but well, I had limited success. The snow proved to be too much for the high powered venerable snow blowing machine. And, of course, the greenhouse gases that it pumps out, did nothing to melt the snow. The house is covered in it. There are no stars, there is no sun. The furnace, which still works, fortunately, melted some snow, but an icicle is hanging on the chimney. This is no winter wonderland, folks. This is complete devastation. I have no idea how the world will recover from this. The albedo of the snow will, of course, reflect sunlight, if ever the clouds clear. The clouds have albedo of their own, so, clearly, we are in a new Ice Age. I personally blame General Motors. Ha, what’s happened here? There are curious markings in the snow. Oh, and look, it’s still coming down. Very light. Oh, yea, this is a tree. My breath freezes instantly. It’s about minus forty, so it really does not matter whether you use the Fahrenheit scale or the Celsius scale, as minus forty is the same for both. I wonder how all this will tax the resolution on Youtube, assuming the Internet continues to work in the new Ice Age. There is the pond. Wow. The snow has been hiding it quite successfully. Where are the edges? Falls off and another wind is picking up. So there you have it folks, the dawn of a new Ice Age.
During the winter of 1978-79, I picked up some extra cash on weekends shoveling off roofs of houses and farm buildings in central Wisconsin. On pitched roofs, we would throw a rope over the peak of the roof and anchor it to something sturdy on the ground, then climb a ladder up to the roof on the far side and use the rope to anchor us as we shoveled. As the snow load needed to be removed from both sides of a roof relatively evenly, to prevent heavy asymetric load conditions, it really worked best to have a guy rigged and shoveling on each side of the roof!
A couple of friends of mine had just climbed up on to the roof of a large farm equipment shed, to start shoveling off the 3 – 4 feet of snow, when the entire building collapsed! They were ‘the straw that broke the camels back’! Neither of them were hurt but had a real surprise when the roof dropped out from underneath them! Plus, we were all in our early 20s then…. and we ‘bounced’ better!
If this year’s 133.6 inches of snow was caused by man-made climate change, what caused the extreme weather that dropped 132.6 inches in 1955?
Lets see, hmm, 133 inches is ~11 feet.
That’s nothing and you are all girlz.
Where I live (northern Japan) we’ve had more than 15 metres, and that’s in town, not up the mountain. It’s still snowing. We’ve had 25 cm in the past 3 days.
Berényi Péter says:
April 8, 2012 at 1:33 pm
The MSM should be fighting over you – your parody is a very good example of the illogical stream-of-consciousness diatribe that one hears all the time from journalists on MSM (CNN, BBC, etc..).
This smokescreen of confusion and illogic tends to defend dogmas such as AGW from scientific and rational criticism.
Here is similar parody of 21st century enironmentla science reporting:
Hmm 1955…+~60. I’m only out 3 years in predicting the collapse of this roof in the picture. I’ve suggested in several earlier posts that it would be a great exercise to take the weather records of 60 years ago and see how close we can predict extreme weather events. I mentioned this in the post on the worst March cold and snow in the Pacific Northwest in 60 years, in the Texas wildfires when they were the worst in 60 years. I predicted much worse tornado seasons I believe it was to occur some 3 or 4 years from now by looking at a plot of the frequency of high energy tornadoes that showed the late 50s early 60s to be eventful. I do think it would be an interesting post for someone with the time and links.
Warmest March everrrrrrrrrrrr!
I was 8 years old during the Winter of 1955. We lived in the Lewiston, ID/Clarkston, WA Valley, where the Snake River is somewhere between 700 and 800 feet above sea level, so the area was called the “Banana Belt” because of the mild climate in comparison to the surrounding highlands, almost two thousand feet higher. But that winter was very cold and snowy even in the Valley. I still have my father’s old 8mm color movie film that he took during that winter. He taught me how to snow ski that winter.
phlogiston;
Yep, you can smell those environmentalists coming, because they’ve all stoppe using toilet paper! Talk about skid marks ….