Another big wet storm bore down on Anchorage and Southcentral Alaska on Thursday, bringing with it piles and piles (and piles) of light snow that left some areas of Alaska's largest city with desert-like dunes. Snowberms on Merrill Field, one of the busiest General Aviation airports in the United States, reached 6 feet tall, higher in some places.
And yet it keeps falling.
The latest forecast from the National Weather Service calls for 10 inches or more in some areas of Anchorage. That's less than the 16-18 inches originally predicted, but a significant amount nonetheless. Snow was expected to continue to accumulate well into Thursday night, with heaviest amounts near the Chugach Mountains to the east.
The weather service map for Southcentral Alaska resembled a battlefield, with regions of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley on down to Anchorage bearing bright green winter weather advisories. Look southeast toward the Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound regions, though, and red blizzard warnings colored the regional map, predicting heavy accumulation and strong winds that would make travel difficult, if not impossible, on state highways. More details here.
Many Alaskans in the area are well conditioned for this latest round of severe weather. A spokesperson with the Anchorage Police Department told Alaska Dispatch there were fewer-than-expected accidents on roads around town -- about 23 crashes and 60 vehicles "in distress" -- but that could change with the evening commute.
This latest snow comes amid one of the wildest, snowiest, windiest and meanest winters on record for coastal Alaska — with a Nome-bound icebreaker and tanker stalled by floes of Bering Sea ice, deep snow triggering an official disaster and shovel emergency in Cordova, and the Seward Highway south of Anchorage shut down due to avalanches. Not to mention another overnight bout, earlier this week, of hurricane-force winds pounding the suburban Anchorage Hillside and Turnagain Arm.
The culprit of the latest storm? Yet another North Pacific low, according to the forecasters.
Although the high-end snowfall prediction of the forecast will likely be seen in East Anchorage or on the Hillside, an official 18-inch dump at the west-side Sand Lake forecast office would go down as the second biggest one-day snowfall in Anchorage history.
Contact Eric Christopher Adams at eric(at)alaskadispatch.com and Doug O'Harra at doug(at)alaskadispatch.com