We're headed into Alaska's long, dark, cold season, with more than six months of chill until the sunshine of late April begins to feel tantalizingly warm.
So let's celebrate winter. After all, there's so much of it to celebrate in the 49th state.
Darkness
As we plunge toward winter solstice in late December, Alaskans have precious little daylight, especially north of the Arctic Circle. In Barrow on the North Slope, residents endure 64 days with no sun, from mid-November to late January. The darkness, called "civil twilight," is more like dusk than pitch black, and there's usually enough light to read a book outdoors on clear days – assuming you like reading in sub-zero temperatures. Here are some daylight lows across Alaska:
• Barrow: 0
• Kotzebue: 1.7 hours
• Fairbanks: 3.7 hours
• Anchorage: 5.5 hours
• Bethel: 5.6 hours
• Ketchikan: 7.1 hours
• Adak: 7.8 hours
Cold
Check out the form documenting the lowest temperature ever recorded in Alaska: minus 80 degrees F at Prospect Creek on Jan. 21, 1971, during a brutal cold snap.
It didn't warm up to minus 25 for a week.
The Prospect Creek Camp housed workers building the trans-Alaska pipeline, and the weather observer collecting data for the National Weather Service worked for the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. However, the Alaska record is a single degree short of the North American low of minus 81 recorded at Snag, Yukon, on Feb. 3, 1947. The lowest in the Lower 48 is minus 70 at Rogers Pass, Montana, on Jan. 20, 1954.
Since the Alaska record was set 43 years ago, several towns have taken a run at the mark but come up short. In 1989, Tanana hit minus 76, while McGrath was minus 75 and Galena recorded minus 70. Six years ago, Chicken hit minus 72.
Such numbing cold may have prompted Interior residents to pull out copies of Jack London's classic "To Build a Fire" to reread such passages as:
"He squatted in the snow, pulling the twigs out from their entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame. He knew there must be no failure. When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire — that is, if his feet are wet."
Big-city cold
What were the coldest and warmest winters in Anchorage (1917-present), Fairbanks (1920-present) and Juneau (1937-present)? The results hint that the planet is indeed warming. Not one of the five coldest winters has occurred since 1971-72. But three of the warmest winters have come since 2000. Here are the average temperatures for the top three in each city in the period from Nov. 1 to March 31:
• Fairbanks coldest: minus 9.7 (1965-66); minus 8.7 (1955-56); minus 8.7 (1932-33)
• Fairbanks warmest: 8.4 (1925-26); 8.4 (1928-29); 7.9 (2002-03)
• Juneau coldest: 21.8 (1955-56); 22.4 (1968-69); 22.8 (1971-72)
• Juneau warmest: 37.8 (1936-37); 37.2 (1976-77); 35.1 (1943-44)
• Anchorage coldest: 9.2 (1917-18); 10.5 (1955-56); 10.9 (1950-51)
• Anchorage warmest: 28.5 (1976-77); 27.6 (2002-03); 27.1 (2000-01)
Snowfall
Thompson Pass between Glennallen and Valdez is the snowiest place in Alaska, and one of the snowiest in the world, averaging 565 inches (more than 47 feet) each winter. Valdez, the terminus of the trans-Alaska pipeline, is the snowiest city, averaging 326 inches (more than 27 feet). The least snowy spot is Beaver Falls, near Ketchikan, averaging just 23 inches.
Big-city snow
Anchorage's deepest single-day snowfall is 22 inches on March 17, 2002 (26.7 inches in a 24-hour period spanning two days). That's two-thirds of the snow Anchorage received (32.9 inches) for the entire winter of 1980-81, which was nearly tropical by Alaska standards. There were periods of 44 and 45 consecutive days with above-normal temperatures. And only 32 days saw at least 2 inches of snow actually on the ground. Fairbanks' deepest snow on a single day is just 16 inches on Feb. 11, 1966, while Juneau's snowiest day was 19.9 inches on Dec. 8, 1962.
Brian Brettschneider is an Anchorage-based environmental planner and climatologist who writes an Alaska weather blog.