In committee vetting Energy Secretary nominee Chris Wright, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski bemoaned how it was colder in Washington, D.C. than it was in Alaska, and that the thermostats are “out of whack.” It’s a problem, she was explaining. Alaska is not cold, and D.C. is.
Directing her remarks at Wright, she then said technologies can help Alaskans adapt to climate change.
Wright was appearing for his first Senate grilling in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where much of the talk from Democrats was about climate change.
This week in Washington, D.C. it is chilly, for the district at least. It’s in the 20s to the low 40s. It will be even chillier next week, during the outdoor Inauguration of Donald Trump as president. Temperatures are expected to reach a low of 11 degrees.
Often, when the temperatures in the continental United States drop, Alaska will experience a warm spell. This curiosity has been happening regularly this winter, with bitter cold weather south, and warmer air moving into Alaska, where today in Utqiagvik it is -6 degrees, in Kotzebue it’s 11 degrees and Nome is a balmy 19, at this writing.
“We’re living with it, we’re dealing with it, we’re feeling it,” Murkowski said to Wright. “We’re feeling it in Alaska right now. I wish I could tell you it’s as cold in Alaska as it is in Washington, D.C.”
Actually, it was colder in Alaska today. Except in Ketchikan, where it is 46 and raining.
Alaska has been going through a warm super cycle for many years, but at least it is not as warm as when dinosaurs roamed Alaska, around 120-million years ago. It was as warm in Alaska then as is current day Puget Sound.
But back to Murkowski’s declaration of coldness in D.C. There’s an explanation.
Meteorologist say that when tropospheric ridges develop in the jet stream over Alaska, it flips the Eastern Pacific Oscillation to negative, and that creates polar air coming over the north pole from Siberia and into Canada and the Lower 48.
This winter in Alaska, the main pattern has been a southerly flow of warm air coming across the warm Pacific Ocean.
These flips in temperatures between the Lower 48 and Alaska happen with frequency, and this particular episode of cold weather for D.C. is not that noteworthy.
“In February 1899, a two-week period of exceptionally cold weather culminated in what weather historian David Ludlum (1970) describes as ‘the greatest Arctic outbreak in history.’ Temperatures fell to 0°F (-18°C) along the beaches of the Gulf Coast and ice flowed from the mouth of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico,” says a report for NASA/Goddard Space Center in 1988. Read more about the phenomenon at this link.
