As much as I both admire and appreciate the National Weather Service and its dedicated personnel, there is a bureaucratic component to the so-called records for Anchorage. First but not least nor last is the fact that there is no continuous record at the Anchorage International Airport.
There have been at least two locations for the station at the airport, (one of which now is not even at the airport — it’s up on Sand Lake Road, 4,000 feet at least from where it was from the 1950s to the 1980s, when it moved. I suspect it was moved around after the 1964 earthquake as well. For the record, the original Anchorage station was in the Ship Creek area. It was then moved to the Delaney Park Strip (which was the airfield in its day). Then it was moved to Merrill Filed and lastly, in the early 1950s, to the airport. All those previous locations were certified official NWS stations by their days’ standards, and when you round numbers off those standards, they are as good as today’s. The central and most representative of Anchorage continues to be Merrill Field (which continues to have a certified officially reporting station). It’s just that the NWS has chosen to fixate on their current location, which is a bust of the so-called direct comparisons.
By real-world standards, we tied the record and Merrill Field hit 90 degrees twice on July 4. Generally, NWS Sand Lake is going to be cooler and have less snow (which is true of the airport as well). Clearly, one winter we blew through the snow record, except at the less snowy airport.Anchorage should go back to using Merrill Field as a central standard, not the Sand Lake Station, though I know in the bureaucratic mind it detracts from that being the Vatican of weather for the NWS Weather Cardinal for Anchorage. It’s supposed to be about weather, forecast and as accurate readings as we can achieve. The NWS station manager in Anchorage should be ashamed of his spin in this regard.
— Gregory Schmitz
Anchorage
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