Edward Plumb Okay, well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the August edition of the Alaska Climate Outlook Briefing. Today’s event is being held at the International Arctic Research Center here on the University of Alaska Fairbanks Troth Yeddha Campus. The Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness, we’re also known as ACCAP, is hosting this event, and ACCAP is part of the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program, which is funded by the NOAA Climate Program Office. ACCAP has been working here in Alaska for almost 20 years to improve the ability of Alaskans to adapt to a changing climate. So, a few logistics before we get started. You have all been muted, and your video has been turned off, and we will have 10 minutes or so for a Q&A after the presentation, and at that time, I’ll allow you to unmute yourself and turn on your video if you want to ask a question directly to Rick. Otherwise, feel free to drop questions into the chat as the presentation goes along, and I will try to answer any questions I can, and if not, I’ll save all those questions in the chat that don’t get answered and bring them up to Rick in the Q&A. The presentation today is being recorded, and I’ll have it on our website probably late this afternoon, but I’ll also send an email out To everyone that’s registered with the direct link to the recording. Additionally, you’re going to be prompted for a brief survey at the end of the webinar. So, we really appreciate if you can take just a few moments to answer the three to four survey questions. The fourth one’s optional. That would be awesome, we appreciate that. So, at that, my name is Ed Plumb, and I am the Weather and Flood Hazards Specialist here at ACCAP. And once again, this month, it’s my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Rick Thoman. And Rick is the Alaska Climate Specialist with ACCAP. And has many years of experience producing reliable Alaska climate information and graphics describing Alaska’s changing environment. His work spans the bridge between climate modeling, Alaska communities, and the media. Alright, Rick, well, thanks again for joining us today, and I’m gonna hand it over to you. Rick Thoman Alright. Thanks very much, Ed, and thanks, everyone, for taking time out of your Friday to join us for the August Climate Outlook webinar, you will immediately notice a new look to the Climate Outlook Briefing slides. Ed Plumb did a lot of work to give us a new and improved look here. I’m quite happy with it. We’ll be, we are always happy to get your opinions on the look and the content of our Climate Outlook webinar. So let’s go ahead and jump right in. So, here’s our outline, same as it’s been for a long time. We’ll do just one slide on kind of the basics of climate, seasonal monthly outlooks, take a look at what’s happened. Take a look at, past forecasts, how those have verified. Then, look at the climate system, current state, some of the tools we have to develop monthly and seasonal outlooks this month, and then we will end with the outlooks for September, the autumn season, and a first look at winter that were released from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center just yesterday. Alright, so, Climate Prediction Center is the primary facility, for NOAA that does outlooks basically two weeks out to about a year into the future, located in College Park, Maryland. Weather forecast offices, river forecast centers are primarily focused on the first week of the forecast, and then CPC picks it up from that. Alright, so, climate outlooks. Very different from the weather forecasts that you get on your phone. So, when we do, climate outlooks, almost invariably, they are done in relationship to some long-term normal. It’s not always the case, but most of the time. Typically, the outlooks are categorical, three categories being perhaps the most common, near normal, significantly above, and significantly below. Unlike the weather forecast on your phone, for most things, we’re going to give you probabilistic forecasts. What does that mean? It means we’re going to give you the chances of all of the categories that we’re forecasting, whether it’s 2, 3, 5, we’re going to give you the chances of all of the categories occurring. Temperatures for the month or season centered on the average. Precipitation centered on the median, that can be different than normal, which by convention is the average or the mean. That can be a significant issue in dry climates or in climates like we have in much of Alaska, where part of the year is quite dry, even though the whole climate overall is not particularly dry. Now, if you’re interested what these normal temperature and precipitation ranges look like in the many climates that we have around Alaska, you can take a look at the link Ed is posted there in the chat. It’s also on the QR code there, and we’ve got those monthly temperature precipitation for quite a number of places. around the state. So, the little graphic here puts all of these pieces together for you. So, we want to make an outlook for the coming autumn for the St. Paul Island Alaska average temperature for the fall here, here’s what we’re gonna do. Our 30-year baseline period, the currently international standard, 1991 to 2020, so what I have done here is I have just rank-ordered the average autumn temperature for each year in our baseline period there, 91 to 2020, And then we’re just gonna split it up into 3 equal categories, because we’re doing 3 category temperature forecasts. By equal categories, we mean that if you count the dots in each, colored box there, you’ll find there’s 10 years, in them. And so, When we make a forecast for the upcoming fall, we’re going to give you the chances that the 2026, autumn temperature, what are the chances it’s going to fall into that red category, the significantly above normal category? The gray area, the near normal category, and in the blue area there, the significantly below normal category. Of course, on either end, anything that would be outside of what’s plotted here, of course, would also fall into either the below or above normal category. That’s what we’re trying to do with Climate Outlooks. Alright, recent happenings around the state. So. After a fairly cool June and July over much, not quite all, but much of the state, things really changed here at the very end of July and through. the first half of August. Statewide, first half of August average temperature about 4 degrees above normal. We have had a number of record temperatures, most notably Juneau Airport, 85 degrees. Earlier this month, that is the all-time record high, for the Juneau Airport in August. Now, after a soaking wet July in South Central, this month, in August, it’s the area of really high precipitation, has shifted into western Alaska, been very wet across much of the Bering Sea coast. At the same time, unusually dry in the interior as well as in southeast. Wildfire season this year has been really interesting. The total area burned is amongst the lowest we’ve had in the last 40 years. The largest fire is the Tatlanika Fire on the Tanana Flats, kind of east of Anderson, southwest. Fairbanks at 35,000 acres, but we have our second, high-impact fire of the season, even though total acreage is low. Of course, the Mukluk Fire at Tok. 5,000 plus acres and homes, outbuildings, and property has been lost in that fire. That was a, that was a fire started by a downed power line on August 17th, and driven, spread rapidly in strong winds. So, it’s a, it’s a good reminder, impacts are not exactly correlated With, with acreage, very low acreage, but this, as well as the as well as the Starry Fire in Anderson in June, required evacuations and, and caused property loss. Next. All right, so let’s take a look at what’s happened and how did, previous, CPC outlooks perform. Very nice picture there, from on the Tanana River there by Back Spawn, there, of the Tatlanika Fire in the, in the evening twilight. Alright, so, here we’re going to use, climate analysis model, these graphics courtesy, Brian Brettschneider with the National Weather Service, and I like these graphics because takes our climate model and these graphics parse out what happened into the three categories that we’re trying to forecast. So, the white space is near normal, the bluish colors are in that significantly below normal category, and the reddish colors in the significantly above normal category. So July is on the left, and the early summer season, May, June, July, on the right. So, June across much of the state, you can see there, in those bluish colors, significantly below normal. Northwest Alaska, more in the near-normal category. But overall, most of the states significantly below normal for July. Combined with what happened in June on the right-hand side, the early summer season there, again, much of mainland Alaska in the significantly below normal category for the three months overall. Notice there is some near normal there in southeast Alaska, and a larger portion of western Alaska in that near normal category, and even squeaking in some, above normal there, around Norton Sound and on the Seward Peninsula. As well. But overall, both July and the early summer season dominated by below normal across the state. Now, total precipitation, again, same idea. Left is the precipitation, again, in the three categories. The yellows and oranges are the significantly below normal category. The above, significantly above normal category in the greens and blues. As always, with precipitation, much more spotty than we have in Then we have, with temperature. July precipitation really dominated by the very high precipitation across South Central, but that, included much of southwest Alaska. Notice, though, as wet as it was in South Central, that did not, was not the case, nearly everywhere. You can see quite, It was significantly below normal precipitation, central panhandle northward, as well as portions of the interior and northwest Alaska, but a real hodgepodge overall. Putting the three months together, July actually was so wet, it completely dominated the precipitation for the 3 months across South Central and Southwest Alaska. You can see there, adding in May and June now, we do have an area of significantly above normal across the northern interior there, and south slopes of the Brooks Range, but notice that near to below normal swath in the Tanana Valley, from Fairbanks up the Tanana Valley, all the way, past Northway and into the western Yukon there, and across northwest Alaska, notice a fairly large area in the significantly below normal category, where we have had, periods of, of at least a couple of intervals here of moderate drought analyzed by the U.S. Drought Monitor in that area, and more recently in the interior as well. Next. Alright, so, how did the forecast do? So, what we have here, the, on the little graphic here, the underlying color field is where CPC, with CPC’s forecast, the colors. indicate where CPC tilted away from equal chances of all three categories. The gray shade is, was just the equal chances. So, the little shapes indicate, what was observed at the available long-term climate sites. And for July temperatures, you can see a fairly large portion of the interior Brooks Range. into the Copper River Basin and all of Southeast were forecast by CPC in the outlook that was made in mid-June to favor the significantly above normal category, and that did not work out anywhere. You can see almost all the long-term climate sites that are plotted here were in the significantly below normal category, with the exception of Nome. and Kotzebue. So, tough forecast here for CPC. Precipitation, worked out a little bit better. Area tilted wet across northwest Alaska. That did not work out. The dry area in south central, on up into the extreme southeast interior, and then all across, the panhandle, more of a mixed bag, and we did have some sites there, central and northern southeast in the eastern Gulf Coast. did verify in the significantly below normal category, but overall, all of South Central, of course, with the extremely high precipitation, of course, that was a two-category miss, and similarly into the Copper River Basin and Upper Tanana Valley. So, all in all, a quarter of the, a quarter of the observations. That fell into an area where CPC tilted the odds, were in the, favored category, and that’s a skill score below zero, so less good than random guessing, but at least some of them were right. Okay, now for the, May, June, July season, this is a forecast that was made in mid-April. You can see the entire state here, the significantly above normal category, was favored, and that worked out, nowhere at all. Vast majority of areas, as we saw from the, climate analysis model in the significantly below normal category, the exceptions being portions of western Alaska, as well as central and southern southeast fell into that near normal category, but not a single one of the long-term climate sites with available data managed to make it into the significantly above normal category. Again, a tough, tough forecast for CPC with temperatures. Precipitation here, so this is a little bit better. Again, the forecast for May through July, made in mid-April here. A wet tilt across from Kodiak Island, westward and northward, up into the, western North Slope. in the southwest Alaska and, the sites that were in the area with a tilt in South Central, that, of course, verified nicely. Did not work out there. Seward Peninsula, Kotzebue area, and Galena there. As well, as well as portions of the Alaska Peninsula wound up in the near normal category. The dry tilt across southeast Alaska did work out at a couple sites. Overall, though, 44% of the sites were in the correct category as forecast by CPC, so that gives a skill score of plus 17, so that is better than the random guest score. So, this month, a tough, tough set of forecasts here for CPC, but we’ll take this one. Alright, turning to sea ice here. Starting out with the aerial extent here, sea ice, as of yesterday, from National Snow and Ice Data Center here, sea ice extent there, the orange lines are the 1981 to 2020 median. And the white space there, of course, is where sea ice concentration is analyzed by the passive microwave data. Greater than 15%. You can see below normal by a lot there on, kind of the Atlantic side from Svalbard, eastward, way, the ice pack edge, way to the north of that, 81 to 2010 median. Similarly, on the kind of the north of the Russian coast, west of Wrangel Island, so west of Alaska, generally below normal. or below, behind the, the median ice pack. The one area with, where ice pack is more, is farther south than, than the average there is in the Beaufort Sea. Near Alaska. Time series there of daily ice extent is on your right, and we are almost exactly on top of where we were last year at this time. Had been running higher, but in recent, about the last 10 days or so. We’ve slipped back to about where we were last year. Currently, as of, as of mid-August, in this NSIDC sea ice index data, it is the 10th lowest extent since 1979. All right, so here is the modeled sea ice thickness, this, courtesy of the Danish Meteorological Institute. This year’s modeled sea ice thickness, as of August 19th, is on the left, and same date last year is on the right. Couple of things of interest here. You will notice, just looking at that left-hand side graphic and comparing it to the right-hand side graphic, there’s more of those, kind of. turquoise colors, so a little bit thicker ice extending from north of Greenland and the northern Canadian Arctic towards the North Pole. thicker ice this year than last year. We also have areas of thicker multi-year ice, close to the, close to the coast in Alaska and the Northwest Territories there in the Beaufort Sea. We had some of that last year, but it was mostly gone, at this point. A lot of that thicker ice, though, is still around. And that accounts for the higher ice extent in the Beaufort Sea that we saw on the last graphic. Next. All right, closer to home, here is the sea ice concentration analysis from the National Weather Service Sea Ice Program. On the left-hand side is the analysis for Wednesday, and on the right, the same date last year. Overall, it looks pretty spotty, and that is, of course, how ice melts. The one really obvious difference this year, you’ll notice that ice extending south-eastward along the northeast Chukotka coast. Some of that ice actually has intermittently drifted into the Bering Strait, the west side of the Bering Strait this summer. Didn’t have any of that on Wednesday, but it has occasionally. That is very different than we had last year, where the ice was all back up towards Wrangel Island. Otherwise, a kind of a Swiss cheese pattern, but you can still see, eastern Beaufort Sea there, kind of, north and northeast of, Prudhoe Bay and north and northwest of Kaktovik there, we’ve still got high concentration ice. Still had some of that last year, but not quite as much of those red colors close to the coast at this point in the season. All right, so here is how, so the, time series here graphic I’ve combined for this month’s webinar the Chukchi and Beaufort Sea Ice Extent. This year is the blue line, last year is the red line. And the, thick, black line there, that’s the, smooth 1991 to 2020 median extent, so expense, or climate, modern climatology, if you will. The big thing, of course, that stands out is we had very high ice extent. in the Chukchi and Beaufort, right into the early days of August, but in the last, last 15 days or so, we’ve really seen a dramatic, dramatic drop, in the ice as, we have increasing low concentration ice, and of course, ice continues to melt, and so while we had been in a top 10 highest ice extent in the whole satellite era since 1979, we’re now actually below the long-term median there. Alright, sea surface temperatures on the left-hand side is global sea surface temperatures for the week ending on the 15th. I’ve just circled the North Pacific and Alaska for your eye. And the little insert is just the, zoom-in to, into Alaska there. So, for the, for this week here, you can see, North Pacific dominated by extremely, warm water relative to normal, extending, east from, Japan. to just south of the Aleutians, and most, but not all the way to the North American coast. At this point, notice most of the Gulf of Alaska is above normal. That’s more clear on the little bit of cutout there. Still do have below normal sea surface temperatures, particularly in the southeast Bering Sea. above normal there in some areas that have been ice-free for a while there, north of the Bering Strait, but the high ice is still, high ice extent, and slow melt is still dominating the analyzed sea surface temperatures near Alaska. In the equatorial Pacific, the, developing, or strengthening at this point, El Niño is very obvious with the extremely warm water, on and near the equator from the South American coast west westward to about, the date line, and mostly near normal. along the equator to the west, this a really classic, El Niño-looking, pattern to these sea surface temperatures. Next. Okay, upper ocean heat content. So we were just looking at the two dimensions, just, or, you know, just the surface temperatures. Now we’re going to look, at depth as well. So on the left-hand side, from the Climate Prediction Center, we have the modeled July ocean heat content, so this is the heat content in the upper 300 meters of the ocean, so quite a large volume of water here. And again, very, very warm water along the equator there, extending to depth. Across the North Pacific, not a lot of change, as you would expect with this volume of water. Things change pretty slowly outside of the deep, deep, tropics. A lot of excess heat in the upper 300 meters of the water extending from Japan eastward, again, most of the way to the North American coast. Southeast Bering Sea and western Gulf of Alaska, just a bit below. the average heat content in that volume of water. Now, on the right-hand side, I’ve started showing this here a few months ago. with the, with the then developing El Niño. But this is a plot of the temperature departure from normal at depth. across the equatorial Pacific. So, the depth below the surface of the ocean, that’s on your vertical axis, and the horizontal axis is longitude, so on the, on the left-hand side of this graphic, that’s over towards the Solomon Islands, and all the way on the right-hand side of this graphic would be near the South American coast, and really spectacularly large temperatures above normal there in the eastern Pacific, kind of southeast of Hawaii over towards South America. You can see areas there in excess of 10 degrees Celsius above normal. I don’t show it here, but I will point out that there’s areas there in the, kind of in the central, Pacific, kind of almost due south of Hawaii, where, water temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius, so 86 Fahrenheit, extend down almost 100 meters below the surface. There is a lot of really warm water in the Central and Eastern Pacific, and it’s not just skin deep. Of course, what we really care about is how these sea surface temperatures and at depth in the equatorial Pacific, how does that connect to the atmosphere, because that’s what’s going to influence our weather. So, this is the, this is our graphics here looking at the tropical atmosphere. On the top here, we have the outgoing long-wave radiation. This is just a proxy in the deep tropics for where thunderstorms are and where they aren’t. The bluish colors indicate more of those tropical thunderstorms than average, the orangish-yellow colors, less. And again, this is looking very, very canonical El Niño, with enhanced thunderstorm activity east of the dateline, and strongly suppressed thunderstorm activity there. Indonesia over to Malaysia area. The atmosphere is shown on the bottom, so this is our graphic showing, basically, the trade wind departures from normal. This is over the last month, and the orange box there, that’s our Niño 3.4. region, that’s kind of the bellwether region for monitoring El Niño, La Nina, and you can see there. Not all, but much of that box. There’s color fields, so winds are stronger than normal, and the arrows there show you the direction of the winds, departures there. And so we have either much, weaker than normal, trade winds there, or in some cases, the actual wind, especially in those orange col, or the yellow colors there, may have actually flipped around to the west. Very, that is very unusual, but really a dramatic, dramatic El Niño signal there, with really, substantially weaker than average trade winds there across the, the central, the west central into the east central, equatorial Pacific. Alright, so let’s take a look at some of the tools now that we have. We’ve seen, kind of where we’re at right now. So. We’re going to first take a look at the El Niño La Nina, the ENSO forecast, the expert evaluation and outlooks. Then we’ll look at a few statistical tools. Can we use the past to get an idea of the future? And then the dynamic seasonal climate models. They know all about the physics. But they don’t know anything about the past except the starting conditions for the model. Take a look at sea ice, sea surface temperatures, and of course, air and temperature, and temperatures of precipitation for the upcoming months and seasons. Alright, so starting off with, will we have an El Niño, or a La Niña, or neither? So these graphics here, produced by the experts at CPC and Columbia University, every month, they put their collective heads together and come up with this very lovely climate forecast. It’s a lovely climate forecast because We’ve got 3 categories that, are being forecast, and the experts give us the chances of all 3 categories here. I like to display these last month on the left, current month on the right, so we can see kind of any change in thinking here. And we do have the El Niño advisory in effect right now, meaning we have El Niño underway. So, as you can see here, about as confident a climate-type forecast as we can possibly make, with a basically 100% chance of El Niño continuing right through the northern hemisphere, winter, and really, that’s what the experts thought last month, and that’s what they still think. As we move into the spring there, do see starting to see, the chances of maintaining that El Niño start to decrease, and chances of being in that, neither El Niño or La Nina increase. But still, very high chances right through group next spring. Now, of course, what’s gotten a lot of press is the strength of this, this, event, and CPC has started issuing on a regular basis now this intensity, forecast, and so, The darkest red colors are the chances that this will be a very strong El Niño. The second shade is strong all the way down to, the lightest red is a weak El Niño, and then it would transition into neutral, and into the blue colors would be La Niña. We, of course, have no blue colors. here, and not much of the gray, the neutral category. If what we see here comparing last month’s, strength probabilities and this month’s on the left, extremely high confidence that, we are going to have a very strong El Niño, better than a 70% chance, or 70% chance or better, let’s say, from August, September, October, right through the mid-winter, December through February season in the northern hemisphere. Extremely, extremely high probabilities. Do have a fairly rapid weakening, decrease of those probabilities as we go, through the winter and into the spring. As we’ll see, Coming up here, do keep in mind, though, that many of the atmospheric and climate system effects of El Niño in the higher latitudes, like our part of the world, often lag the the temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. So just because we might not be in a strong, very strong El Niño by the time we get to spring does not mean that any impacts would be decreasing. Alright, so let’s go ahead and take a look at some of our climate, or our statistical guidance for our climate outlooks. Start off with long-term trends, take a look at then at short-term trends, sometimes called optimum climate normals, and since we’ve got such a, such a notable El Niño, let’s take, we’ll take a look at how El Niños have, what’s happened in El Niños during the autumn season since 1970? Alright, here is the half-century trend for September. On the left, total change in the average temperature over the past 50 years. On the right, the change in September precipitation. Temperatures, as you can see there, warming across the entire region here. Strongest warming is, of course, up over the Chukchi and Beaufort seas due to sea ice loss, but That change, of course, extends onto the coast. Generally, North Slope having the strongest warming during September, but everywhere’s got significant warming, maybe least in portions of the interior, but everywhere is warming. On the right-hand side, with precipitation, more of a mixed bag, but in general, over the last 50 years, September’s wetter in southeast, as well as portions of the interior. Some areas do show drying, modest drying Kodiak Island area, portions of the Alaska Peninsula, as well as the Bering Strait region into northwest Arctic Borough. Those aren’t big changes overall, but, interesting, as always, precipitation, more, more, Spotty than the broad brush temperatures. All right, how about the last 15 years? So, what we’re gonna do here is we’re gonna compare what’s happened, 2011 to 2025, compare that to our 30-year baseline period, which is 91 to 2020, and what I’ve done here using the 13 Alaska Climate Divisions If the average temperature over those 15 years falls into the significantly above normal category from our 30-year baseline, gets colored a red, or a case of precipitation, green, and if it’s in that below normal category. For temperatures, it gets colored blue, and if it’s precipitation, gets colored. In the orange, white space means over the last 15 years, the average has fallen within that near-normal category. So, with that explanation, you can see September temperatures over most of the state last 15 years. Not much to write home about, the exception being, the, the northern, Panhandle Climate Division, that basically the Haines-Skagway area, there, with, the last 15 years have fallen into that significantly above normal category. More, larger area there in the fall, so upper right-hand side, September through November, average temperatures last 15 years in the significantly above normal categories in the two eastern interior climate divisions, as well as the Aleutians. September precipitation, been the last 15 years wet across the North Slope and northeast interior, but falling into the below normal category there, in the Aleutians. Autumn precipitation for the full 3 months, though, much larger area, much of mainland Alaska, away from the Bering Sea coast, including Cook Inlet, has the last 15 years falling into that significantly above normal category. Interestingly, Central Panhandle Climate Division, which is the, includes the Juneau area, last 15 years falling into that significantly below normal category. And, okay, what’s happened during, autumn, during El Niños? Given the strength of this El Niño, we’re already at moderate, and nearly all the model guidance, the expert guidance, has this developing very quickly into a strong, or a very strong. El Niño, I’ve gone ahead here, and looking only at El Niños that were moderate or stronger during the fall since 1990, here is what we see. So, Left-hand side, temperatures. Right-hand side, precipitation. So, this is the, the median category of the three categories that we’re trying to do, near normal, significantly above, and significantly below. This is the median category that has occurred. Now, I’ve, the, the baseline we’re using is the, that appropriate. for the era, so the 1970s, El Niño, 72, 76, 77, that is using the 1941 to 70 baseline period. The most recent El Niño, autumn 2023, that’s using the 1991 to 2020, baseline, so in that way, we, we, take into account not just the changing climate, but it makes it an apples-to-apples comparison. So, as you can see, over the last, since 1970, so that’s, what, 50, 56 years now, the majority of the state during El Niño, moderate and stronger, has, the actual outcome has been in the significantly above normal category. There is a fair chunk of area there, mostly in the interior, but also in portions of southwest Alaska, as well as, say, the Seward Peninsula, where neither significantly above or significantly below has been the dominant category, but obviously, the dominant color on that left-hand graphic is red. No place on this projection there is significantly below normal in the majority category. Precipitation. Not quite as much coverage as temperature, although overall, most of Alaska there, what there is is to favor significantly above normal precipitation during El Niño autumns. As, of course, it’s, it’s more spotty than, than the temperatures. Notice, though, in southeast Alaska, we do not have, there’s really, basically no, no, favored category, and out over the, at least the, eastern Aleutians, maybe, dry is favored. But for most of mainland Alaska, if there’s a favor, it’s to significantly above. the normal during moderate and stronger El Niños. Alright, so now we turn to our dynamic model forecast, so, we’ve got a number of these that we use, including the CPC Experimental Sea Ice Outlook, the World Climate Service Multi-Model Ensemble, and the North American Multimodel Ensemble. So we’ve got, various different models forecast here. And, as I mentioned, we do sea surface temperatures, sea ice forecast, as well as the temperature and precipitation relative to normal. All right, so starting with sea surface temperatures here from the North American Multimodel Ensemble, about 100 different model runs, and each model run is compared to its own system’s climatology, not the real-world climatology. So that is, that helps a little bit with, bias correction. If a model is consistently too warm or too wet, in some ways, comparing it to itself is a very, helps to filter that. down a little bit. So on the left-hand side, we have the ocean temperatures forecast for the autumn season here from all of these different models. You can see, does not look wildly different than what we have at the moment, well above normal waters, relative to that long-term normal extending from Japan most of the way east to the North American coast, including the Gulf of Alaska. Notice the models, though, do keep that cool air, cool water, in the southeast Bering Sea. Along the equatorial Pacific, really a classic El Niño signal there, with extremely, extremely warm water forecast there, along the equator, east of the dateline. Now, we would like to know how good these ocean temperature forecasts are, and that is the graphic on the right-hand side. And so, for forecasts that were made in August for the upcoming autumn, what we want to see over the oceans are skill scores that are in those purple colors. We have that along the western North American coast. along most of the Pacific Equatorial area, except way back kind of north of Papua New Guinea there. Notice, though, that we have, a lot of those green or even yellow colors there in the North Central Pacific, kind of east of Japan, to east of the dateline, and that’s an area where the models have relatively low skill. in forecasting sea surface temperatures for the autumn, even just from when they’re initialized starting conditions in August. Alright, sea ice forecast. So, we’re, we’re coming up on the end of the melt season, have, depending on the latitude, we’ve got a few more a few more weeks to go in the melt season, but this is the Climate Prediction Center’s experimental sea ice outlook. This is the, from the 20 different, model runs of this experimental model. This is the September average sea ice concentration. Really interesting-looking, pattern. The, you can see there, on, on the Atlantic side, north of Svalbard, north of Franz Josef Land there, that archipelago to the east of, Svalbard, the sea ice edge forecast to be extremely far north, 84 north, that is really, you know, so now we’re talking within a few hundred miles of the North Pole, on the average open water. The Pacific side, and particularly north of the Northwest Territories, Canada and Alaska, very interesting. You can see a belt there of higher concentration ice being forecast with lower concentration ice to the north. A very unusual pattern. For the end of the melt season, but it’s not out of the question that this could work out, because that belt of whiter color, so higher concentration ice there. Are the, is that areas that have, that, with that thicker multi-year ice? If that doesn’t melt out, we could easily wind up with something, resembling this forecast. So, very, very interesting. Alright, next. Now, turning to temperatures and precipitation, starting off here with the North American Multi-Model Ensemble. Temperatures are on the top, precipitation are on the bottom, this is the forecast for September. And, these are, these are the chances of the three categories that we’re trying to forecast, from the North American Model, North American Multi-Model Ensemble. And the way I like to do these, I like to see how the forecast evolves through time, and so the forecast that was made in June for September is on the left, forecast that was made in July for September is on the, in the middle, and the most current, the August forecast. is on the right. Just scanning your eyeball across the top row there. In general, above normal, significantly above normal is the favored category across all of Alaska, but especially, for South Central, Gulf of Alaska coast. Notice this month, we see, see where previously the models had had significantly above normal Beaufort and Chukchi coast, now we see the reflection of those lower sea surface temperatures and sea ice, with, that below normal category being favored. And that does show up a little bit, inland, too, with, favoring, or no category being favored. Precipitation on the bottom, there is a whole lot and not much there for Alaska. A whole lot of white space, so all three categories equally likely. If you want to say there’s a little consistency, for a weak tilt to significantly above, maybe, The central, south central, maybe into the interior. That might work, but that is a pretty small area to hang, too much of any confidence on that one. So not much to get out of the precipitation there. Now, let’s turn to our colleagues at the World Climate Service. So, they take two models, the European climate system and the U.S. Climate Forecast System, and they put these together. Now, the difference that the World Climate Service does here is they give higher weight to the model that has done better, that is, the verification has been closer to reality. North American multi-model, every model gets the same weight. Here, we weight the more skillful models for this particular month or season. When, when, World Climate Service does this, we get these two graphics, again, temperature on the left, precipitation on the right, strongly favoring now, across nearly all of the states, significantly above normal, with, large area there in the Bering Sea, favoring that near-normal category. Don’t see that all that often. Not so much of a reflection of the below normal across the southern Beaufort and, Chukchise Seacoast there. Precipitation, World Climate Service. Processing of these gives us exactly a big fat zero to go on for September precipitation from these models. Same idea here for the autumn 2026 season. Temperatures on the top, precipitation on the bottom. Now we’ve got pretty good agreement across the temperature row there, favoring significantly above normal over the majority of the state. Precipitation, maybe there’s a little bit more of a signal here now for somewhere in mainland Alaska to favor significantly above normal, precipitation, really not much signal there in southeast. Last month, there was maybe an area there with, favoring below normal precipitation, but we don’t have continuity through time with that. So again, not much to go on here with precipitation, maybe over the central portion of the mainland. World Climate Service, warm for the, warm for the season, that’s on the left-hand side, and you can see some of those probabilities are getting pretty high there out over the Aleutians, and even into, southern, southern panhandle there, but generally, a pretty strong tilt here to favor significantly above normal. Again, that’s in, that is in, broadly in agreement with what has happened in past, El Niño autumns. Precipitation, really nothing that we can use here as a forecast tool. Hardly any signal comes out of these two models when we weigh them for skill. And the last piece of the puzzle here is what the experts thought last month, and this was the September outlook that was issued by CPC in July. You can see all of the state, except for the central and western Aleutians. We’re favoring, significantly above normal, and quite a strong tilt across the, from the Alaska Range southward, including all of south central, Copper River Basin, and all of the Panhandle. Precipitation on the right-hand side, most of the state modestly favoring significantly above normal precipitation. However, southeast kind of the eastern interior Copper River Basin, and most of southeast in that equal chances, except for basically the Ketchikan to Hyder area, where there was a slight tilt to favor significantly below normal precipitation. And the answers, as revealed by CPC just yesterday morning, are, Ta-da! The September outlook from CPC. So, you can see here, the September outlook, North Slope wrapping around across the Seward Peninsula into southwest Alaska, the Alaska Peninsula, as well as the eastern Aleutians. Equal chances of all three categories. However, the rest of the state, favoring significantly above normal. generally, most of South Central, most of the central and eastern interior, all of southeast, about twice the chance in the CPC forecast of being significantly above normal, as opposed to the significantly below normal category. Precipitation, we do see CPC here favoring kind of an east-to-west, or west-to-east band here of area with significantly enhanced Chance of, of, above normal precipitation, kind of an unusual shape there, with equal chances, in the north, Brooks Range northward, as well as, most of, all of southeast, southwest Alaska, and at least the Kenai Peninsula. Kodiak Island in South Central. Oops, I think we got our labels wrong there, Ed. So this is actually the September through November outlook. You can see here, all of the state is favoring significantly above normal temperatures for the 3-month season, with the exception of the lowest, the lower portion of the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutians, and again, a strong Better than 50-50 chance of significantly above normal there from the Copper River Basin southeastward, including all of southeast. Above normal precipitation for the season favored there across western Alaska into the western Kenai Peninsula. Equal chances over most of the rest of the rest of the state, including most of the interior, the immediate Anchorage area, and most of the southeast, again, still have that small area of, significantly below normal, slightly favored there, Ketchikan Hyder area. Now, first look at the winter, from, that we’re showing from CPC. And this is, this is strongly, built on what’s happened in, in past, El Niños. With, temperatures on the left, we see none, neither above, below, or Near normal being favored across western Alaska. That is in keeping, with what’s happened in past, winters during El Niños. Most of the state favoring, significantly above normal. Strongest odds across southeast Alaska. Now, unlike the autumn, the strongest signal that we have for El Niño is actually precipitation. A large area there, favoring significantly below normal precipitation during the winter season, so the midwinter season here. With the exceptions being a small area favoring significantly above normal, basically, from Cordova over to, the northern, outer coast of Southeast, and then small areas of equal chances there, for, most of southeast, Kodiak Island, and the Alaska Peninsula Aleutians. So, this is quite, quite an interesting forecast to see. We’ll see how this plays out, but this is very much a, a, what, this is reflecting what’s happened in past El Niños. Big caveat, though, we are very likely looking at one of the strongest El Niños in the past century or more, possibly the strongest, so it is entirely possible that, past performance may not be indicative of, what happens here. We’ll just have to see how this plays out, but we are in some ways really in uncharted territories with both this El Niño and the globally very, very warm ocean temperatures. Here is our list of upcoming webinars. We’ve got a, we’ve got a whole, whole series of them for you here. I’ll be back with you for part of our Tuesday webinar, along with Charlie Parr. And we’ll be, we’ve been developing some, drought monitoring tools for Alaska, and we’ll be presenting those to you. And then, another exciting one we’ve got coming up, Eleanor Greenbaum’s gonna talk about her work. With, rain and winter in interior Alaska, and the impacts of that, and then, I’ll be back with you on September 18th there. So, with that, Ed, I think that’s what I’ve got for everyone today. Edward Plumb Awesome, thanks, Rick. Appreciate you sharing, especially, you know, what we could expect with the upcoming Super El Niño here in Alaska. I guess we’ll just kind of have to wait and see what happens, huh? As for questions, I did, everyone, you can unmute yourself or turn on your video if you’d like to ask a question to Rick directly, but we do have a number of questions in the chat there, Rick. I don’t know if you want me to read them to you. I think there’s at least 3, or if you want to read them out loud yourself and answer them, or, Rick Thoman your, we’ll, we’ll do the easy ones first, Charlie Parr. How many autumn, moderate plus El Niño since 1970, go into those plots? The answer is 13. There were a couple of weak El Niños that I got thrown, that I tossed out, but still, we had 13, in the last 56 years. Scrolling up, I see a question from Major Alex Daniels. When CPC was making their summer temperature predictions for Alaska, were they using NMME? temperatures for all of Alaska. From CPC, we’re out to lunch, for their predictions. How much, do you trust, how much trust do you place in NME temperature forecasts? So, the short answer is, Major Daniels, that, CPC has a lot of tools to use. NMME is just one of them. The developing, El Niño, or more generally, the ENSO state is also a factor there. That, of course, is not, you know, that’s not entirely independent, of the NMME. The models, in some sense, know. that, what’s going on in the Equatorial Pacific, but CPC is able to use that information, in other ways as well. Another, another significant, tool in the CPC forecasts is, trends, both long and short term. So, I think the short answer to your question is that CPC has multiple tools at their disposal. A big one, but not the only one, is the multi-model ensembles. Edward Plumb Looks like you’ve got one more there, Rick, in the chat. Rick Thoman Did I say anything about the, teleconnections that may have occurred with the very persistent, very warm water north of northwest Pacific off the Japanese coast? Yeah, so you’re absolutely right, Robes. That area of extremely warm water east of Japan has been there, I’d have to go back and look, but it’s been there literally for years. You’ll recall this was a big factor in Merbok in 2022. with, that very warm water. So, I can think we can say for sure that that is not, directly an El Niño, effect, but, Having, having, you know, the persistence on the order of years here, that, that, you know, it’s undoubtedly got something to do with the deeper ocean circulations being modified by the heat accumulation within the ocean overall, would be my first guess, rather than a, you know, a seasonal scale atmospheric-type teleconnection. Edward Plumb Okay, thanks, Rick. We got a thanks for the use of the photo. I think that was the one from the Tanana River, looking at the Tatlanika fire. And any, looks like we’re almost to the top of the hour. Any last questions? Feel free to unmute yourself if you want to ask a question. Okay, hearing nothing. Well, happy Friday, everyone. Hope you all have a, Great weekend, and enjoy getting out on these last few weekends of summer before we fully transition into fall, and We’ll see you again next month. Same place, third Friday of the month, and thanks again, we appreciate it. Rick Thoman Thanks, everyone. Have a good weekend.