Edward Plumb
Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the September 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, or also known as ACCAP, is hosting this event today, 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 around 20 years to improve the ability of Alaskans to adapt to a changing climate. A few logistics before we get started. Everyone, you've all been muted and your video is disabled, but we'll have about a 10-minute Q&A session after the presentation, and at that time, if you want to unmute yourself and turn on your video to ask any questions, I will allow you to do that. Otherwise, please drop questions into the chat as Rick is presenting today, and I will try to answer any I can, and any we don't get to, I'll bring up during the Q&A session to Rick. Today's webinar is being recorded, and I will have the recording up on the ACCAP website later today.

I'll also send you an email with the link to the recording. Additionally, when you log out from the webinar today, you'll be prompted for a brief survey. I know a lot of people are returning customers and have probably filled out the survey, but if you haven't, feel free to take a few moments to answer 2 to 3 questions. With that, my name is Ed Plumb, and I am the Weather and Flood Hazards Specialist here at ACCAP. And it's once again my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Rick Thoman. 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. Rick, thanks for joining today and putting this together, as you do every month, and I'm gonna hand it over to you.

Rick Thoman
All right, great. Thanks very much, Ed, and thanks to all of you for taking time out of your Friday to join us. We've been doing these monthly Alaska Climate Outlook webinars now for more than 10 years. And there is rarely a dull moment when it comes to Alaska climate and the outlook. So let's go ahead and jump right in.

All right, here is our agenda for today. This is what we do every month. Start out with just one slide, reviewing what we're trying to do with seasonal outlooks, very different than the weather forecasts on your phone. Take a look at what's happened recently, and then how past forecasts have done, current state of the climate system, look at some of the tools that we have available to construct the upcoming month and seasonal forecast, and then we will finish up with the climate outlooks that were released by NOAA just yesterday morning.

Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, is the primary facility for NOAA that is working the outlooks from basically 2 weeks into the future on out to about a year into the future. Weather forecast offices and river forecast centers, mostly working in the first week of the future. CPC covers the next year after that.

Basics of climate forecasting. Unlike weather forecasts. When we do outlooks in general, we are doing outlooks in relationship to some long-term normal. The current international standard for that long-term normal is the 30 years, 1991 to 2020. Typically, climate outlooks are done in categories, not absolute values, and three is a common number of categories. So, significantly below normal, near normal, significantly above. Climate outlooks are also typically probabilistic. However many categories we're doing, we're going to give you the chances of each of those categories occurring in an upcoming month or season. Temperatures are centered on the average, precipitation centered on the median, that can be a little bit different than the normal, which by construction, or by history, really, is the average. So, in dry climates, or in places that have dry seasons, the median can be significantly lower than the normal. Now, if you're interested in what these temperature and precipitation ranges look like for quite a number of places around the state, we've constructed those graphics, and they are available on the ACCAP website there, and you can get to it through the QR code there, or, from, from our front, web page as well.

The little graphic here puts all of these things together. In this case, Yakutat. We want to make an outlook for the upcoming October through December period. We're going to forecast the total precipitation, but we're not forecasting one number. Rather, we're going to give you the chances that it falls into these three categories, above, near, and below normal, and these categories are constructed directly from our baseline, in this case, 1991 to 2020. So, I just rank-ordered the total precipitation in each of those late autumn seasons for Yakutat, and if you count up the dots, you'll see there's 10 dots, 10 years, in each category. For the upcoming October through December precipitation, we'll give you the chances that the total precipitation will fall into each of the three categories. That's what we're trying to do with most climate outlooks.

All right, so some recent highlights since the last time that we got together back in mid-August here. Probably most significantly, significant coastal flooding at Utqiaġvik, September 12th and 13th there. This image from the morning of the 13th here, you can see, there is a road there that goes north from downtown Utqiaġvik was not passable due to, flooding. Strong southwest winds, winds gusted to almost 60 miles an hour, and pushing that water right onto the coast. This is part of a generally fairly stormy pattern that's impacted much of west and southwest Alaska. During the first half of September. Now, stepping back just a little bit from that stormy pattern. On the very last day of August, we saw a fairly widespread light, but enough snow to accumulate from hills in the interior all the way down to the Anchorage hillside. Now, end-of-August snow doesn't happen, of course, every year, but it's not that uncommon, at moderate elevations in the interior and in the Alaska range, but accumulating snow even in late August on the Anchorage hillside is pretty rare. But we had it this year. Of course, it didn't last very long, melted out the next day.

Now, with this stormy pattern we've been in, particularly north of the Alaska Range, we have seen a lot of rain. Galena actually wound up not only with the wettest August, but it was actually the most precipitation in any calendar month in Galena's climate history. That's observations going back, with a few gaps into the early 1940s. Fairbanks also had the highest first half of September precipitation. McGrath is running very high precipitation since midsummer, the July through September 15th precipitation is the highest of record. And very interestingly, downriver from McGrath, there's a long-term river gauge at Crooked Creek on the Kuskokwim, and with all of this rain, the Kuskokwim at Crooked Creek is running at or close to record high levels for mid-September. All of this rain this late in the season, now just, weeks before freeze-up, could have some ramifications, as we go through the winter, and potentially even into next spring.

All right, well, there's a picture of the snow on the Anchorage hillside there, courtesy of Gene Petrescu there. That's at about 2,100 feet elevation on Highland Drive there, on the last day of August, up above Eagle River. So, nice, nice way to introduce our climate review, what happened, and how did the climate outlooks from CPC perform?

All right, so, here we're gonna use the climate analysis model called ERA5, and these graphics, courtesy of Brian Brettschneider with the National Weather Service, show from the climate analysis model what happened, and the colors here are the categories that we're trying to forecast. So, the white space would be areas that are near normal. August is on the left, and the summer season is on the right. The areas in red, reddish colors, those are significantly above normal category. The blues are significantly below normal. So, with that background, you can see on the left-hand side, August, virtually all of Alaska, with some small exceptions on land, especially Bristol Bay area and portions of the Aleutians, wound up in the significantly above normal category. That, of course, extended into northwest Canada as well. Now, for the summer season as a whole, we see a whole lot more white space, so a whole lot more of that near-normal category, and that's because in many areas, of course, the first two months of the summer were near to below normal, so putting the three months together, we get a whole bunch of near normal, with above normal there across portions of southeast Alaska and then into northwest Canada.

Also, a few areas there in western Alaska, mostly over the water. Also in the above normal category. More widespread below normal, including Prince William Sound area, portions of, Bristol Bay, and the Aleutians there.

Now, same idea with precipitation here, again, from the climate analysis model here. In this case, we have again, the white spaces near normal, the greens and blues are significantly above, and the yellows and oranges significantly below August on the left-hand side. You can see a lot of those green and blue colors across western Alaska poking into the interior, especially the northeast interior, but a very sharp transition to significantly below normal southeast Interior, from about Anchorage eastward in Southcentral, as well as much of the Aleutians and pretty much all of southeast. In western Alaska, those blue colors indicate this August had the highest precipitation in the climate analysis model. That was borne out there at Galena at the station observation, but you can see, western Alaska and the northern interior really, really wet. On the other hand, continued dry weather across the southeast interior, and as we see on the right-hand side. The pattern is pretty much the same for the whole summer, and of course, that dry in the southeast for the whole summer. Excuse me, continue contributing to the highly destructive Mukluk Fire at Tok in mid-August.

You can see there, portions of the area there west of Anchorage in southwest Alaska wound up in the climate analysis model with the wettest summer of record, and a lot of places in that much above normal. Category. On the other hand, southeast Alaska well below normal for both August and the summer as a whole, and we have had some moderate drought analyzed by the U.S. Drought Monitor, for portions of southern southeast Alaska.

Okay, now we're going to take a look at how the Climate Prediction Center forecasts, and here, the underlying color field is the forecast from Climate Prediction Center. The shapes are what actually happened at the available long-term climate sites. So, the August forecast that was made in mid-July by the Climate Prediction Center, you can see there, basically Brooks Range southward, everywhere, the above-normal category, significantly above normal category, was favored. And that worked out at quite a number of places. It also worked out on the North Slope there, where the CPC did not favor any of the three categories. Fairly large area, though. From the station observations from Prince William Sound westward into southwest Alaska. And even up into Norton Sound. Where we had the observations came in the near-normal category, farther west above normal. So, generally, a reasonably good forecast. 63% of the observations that were in an area that the CPC actually favored a category worked out. So that's a skill score of 45. Remember, skill score of 0 means the random chance, so this was definitely much better than just guessing.

Okay, August precipitation, again, forecast made in mid-July here. So again, a pretty good forecast here. You can see wet favored across western and central portions of the state. Worked out reasonably well in the west. Did not work out in South Central or Kodiak Island on up into the Alaska range. There was an area there favoring below normal precipitation in central and southern Southeast, although not quite as far north as Juneau, and that worked out, at two of the three sites there as well. Overall, skill score of 28, got just over half of the observations in the area with a tilt, worked out. So, again, that's a, that's a skillful forecast. Precipitation is much harder than temperature, and so, that's pretty good for precipitation. Yup, I got a little panicky there. Where's the image? But there it is. Okay, Now, for the 2026 summer season, these are forecasts that were made in mid-May. You can see here, most of the, most of the state, again, except basically south of the Brooks Range, forecast favored the significantly above normal category, and that worked out almost nowhere, except for a couple places there in southeast Alaska.

This was, only 7% of the observations fell into the correct category, and, so, a forecast that just did not work at all in most places, either in that near normal or significantly below normal category.

Precipitation did pretty well, not a lot of area coverage for the summer forecast, significantly above normal, slightly favored across western and northern Alaska. But not into southeast, and, that worked out okay. Obviously, in kind of the Interior down into South Central, you see all the categories represented there. That is a very, you know, there's no way to forecast. That, ahead of time, that kind of spread. That's not uncommon with summer precipitation. A little bit more consistency there in southeast, where, the observations, either in the near or significantly below normal category, but CPC didn't make the, make a tilt there, so don't get any credit for that. All in all, though, where they made it, made a forecast, it did work out okay.

Alright, let's turn our attention to, Sea ice. Arctic-wide sea ice extent minimum, looks like it occurred earlier this week. Almost exactly the same as last year. Looks like it ties for 11th lowest. As of Wednesday, this was the spatial view on the left-hand side. Again, this is sea ice extent, so any areas with sea ice concentration higher than 15% get colored white, and anything below get colored blue. The orange lines there are the 1981 to 2010 baseline, median ice edge. And you can see ice has retreated back On both the Atlantic and Pacific side. You will notice there on the Atlantic side, kind of northeast of Svalbard, the pack ice edge, up at around 83 degrees north, not so far north on the Pacific side, but still, well, well back from the, from the historic, where we'd expect it to be in mid-September. The daily plot of ice extent is on the right-hand side. I just circled where we're at Right now, this year, I've got the arrow pointing to it there, 11th lowest. It's, this year is almost exactly on top of last year's extent, but, significantly above where we were at in 2024 at this date.

Sea ice thickness product, this is from the Danish Meteorological Institute, and here, the, this is a modeled product, so this is the modeled sea ice thickness. Colors bar there, showing there, the thickness in meters. Again, on Wednesday is on the left. And the same date last year on the right. Main thing to call your attention to here, you'll notice that, looking at the left-hand side, so as of Wednesday's ice thickness, as modeled by DMI, The area of thick ice is really, really thinly confined there, from the north coast of the Canadian Arctic Island, Ellesmere Island there, southwest to just to the, just offshore of Banks Island there in northwest Canada, and a little bit along the northern Greenland coast. That, if anything, is even skinnier area of thick ice than we had at this date last year. On the other hand, this year, you'll notice, say, from the northern Canadian islands. North coast of Greenland, up towards the pole. We've definitely got, in the modeled scheme of things here at least, thicker ice, up towards the pole, from Canada and Greenland than we had last year when the ice was noticeably thicker.

The little inserts there show the, again, the modeled ice volume, and, With that thicker ice up towards the pole, we do wind up with, at least fractionally, a little bit, little bit higher volume of ice being shown for this year than we had last year, although they're both right at the bottom of the historical simulations here.

Close to home, here we have the National Weather Service Sea Ice Program, sea ice concentration analysis. Wednesday's analysis is on the left, and the same date last year on the right. You can see there are some differences here. Between the two. You'll notice, starting at the top of the analysis there, we do have an area of ice-free waters analyzed as of Wednesday there. Fairly far north, up as far north as 77 north, but south of there, there is more significant ice, and you can see that we do have higher concentration ice kind of north of the northeast Alaska coast, north of the Yukon coast there. Than we did last year. Last year, there was some ice, but it was mostly more widely dispersed. Now, that remaining higher concentration ice There off the northeast Alaska coast. That is the remnants of some of that thick multi-year ice that came down in the Beaufort Gyre, from north of the Canadian Arctic Islands last winter and spring. Being thicker ice, of course, it takes, much longer to, to melt out, and so we wound up with this ice relatively close to the coast, through, through the summer. Other thing I'll call your attention to this year.

As of Wednesday, there was still a little bit of ice left. Off of the, northeast Chukotka coast, that ice has been slowly melting out. During the course of the summer. We didn't have it that far southeast last year, but we did. A couple, three years ago, we had some ice in that area. In 2023 and 2024, that ice eventually melted out, and I suspect That will happen as well this year with that, that ice will completely melt out, and so will not be around to start the new ice season.

All right, now, looking at the time series of ice extent here, as we've been doing all summer, combining the ice extent in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas here, the blue line is this year, the green line is last year, and the black line is the 1991 to 2020 median. That's our 30-year baseline period here. Now, of course, the big thing here is that we were running at high, high sea ice extent. Right into, the first week of August. In fact, at some point there, right around August 1st. The ice extent was not, was actually quite similar to what we might have expected in the 1980s. But then dramatic, dramatic and rapid drop during the middle of August there, dropping below the 30-year median, and you can see we wound up here now. With the ice. It's a little bit higher than we had last year, but not dramatically, and well below the median. So, you know, this is, this is kind of interesting. While it looked like, the ice extent looked like the 1980s, at the beginning of August, the fact that it's nearly all, except for that chunk in the Beaufort Sea, first-year ice. That means it can do things like show this dramatic drop because the ice is thin.

And it's much more easily melted out than it would be if that ice had had a significant fraction of older, thicker ice in it. So, we wind up, actually, with a typical, not terribly low, but not especially high, ice extent here near Alaska for the middle of September here.

All right, turning to the global oceans here, sea surface temperatures on the left for the week ending of September 12th, and the, on the right there, that's just the cutout, for in and around Alaska there. And I've just circled the North Pacific for you. To draw your eye. You can see there, across the North Pacific from Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands up towards, the Alaska coast, we have, waters much above normal. On the other hand, from kind of east of Japan. Arcing a little bit south, and then all the way over to the British Columbia and, say, Washington State coast, we've got a belt there of near-normal sea surface temperatures. Looking, looking farther south, and of course, near the equator, this looks like it's out of a textbook here for El Niño, extremely warm water near the equator, extending from South America westward to, south of Hawaii, but by the time we get to the dateline, sea surface temperatures back to near normal, and even, areas of below normal farther west. Really a textbook El Niño pattern right there.

Now, we were just looking at the surface, sea surface temperature departures from normal. Of course, we want to look at how the temperatures vary with depth, too, so on the left-hand side. From the Climate Prediction Center, this is the August, the heat content departure from normal for the upper 300 meters of the ocean, so we're looking at quite a volume of water here. So here you can see across the North Pacific, the warmth is not just skin deep across the North Pacific, particularly, kind of, east of the Kuril Islands to south of the Aleutians, that heat extends to depth, not so much in the northern Gulf of Alaska, although we actually do see a slight increase in the total heat content in August compared to July. Along the equator, just a lot of hot water there along the equator east of the dateline, but again, west of the dateline, the total heat content well below normal. Again, textbook El Niño here. Now, looking at the, looking on the right-hand side here. Now, this is here, we are looking specifically, right along, right near the equator, the vertical axis here is the depth below surface, and the horizontal axis is longitude across the Pacific.

So the, so the left-hand corner there of the, of this graphic is over towards the Solomon Islands. The right-hand edge of this graphic is over towards the South American coast. Obviously, what jumps out at your eye here is the very dark red colors there across the eastern Pacific. These are temperature departures in degrees C. So, the bullseye there, 11 degrees C, so that is pushing 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal there at about 125 meters below the surface to the west of the South American coast. That's the red area there, which is really, really extreme, draws your eye, but I'd call your attention to the cooler waters back to the west there. West of the date line, we do have We do have an increasing area of water with, the temperature is below average. Less so at the surface, although there's some of that, but it's increasing at depth there. And that's going to be important for the evolution of this El Niño.

Of course, as impressive as those sea surface temperatures and the temperatures at depth are, what really matters for our weather is how those sea surface temperatures and what's happening at depth connect to the atmosphere. So, we have a couple of tools to look at that. On the top, we have our outgoing long-wave radiation, which is just a proxy for where are and where aren't those big tropical thunderstorms. The, kind of the blues and magentas show areas where we have more of those big tropical thunderstorms than average. And the yellows and oranges are less. Again, this is a, this is a textbook El Niño. We've got enhanced thunderstorm activity, east of the dateline, and much less thunderstorm activity in Indonesia, Malaysia area. Again, exactly what we expect in a El Niño. The bottom graphic here shows the trade wind departures from average, and this is really quite remarkable. Not only are trade winds weaker than normal there in our bellwether area, that's the little orange box, the so-called Niño 3.4 region, but, those west wind departures from average there are more westerly. That there, kind of along the dateline and to, into the western part of the Niño 3.4 area, that's so strong, that's not only are they trades weaker, the winds in some of those areas will have actually turned around and are really blowing out of the west.

That is a sure sign of a really significant El Niño.

Okay, so that's the current state of the climate system, so now we're going to take a look at some of the tools that we have to make the upcoming month and seasonal forecast. We've got the El Niño forecast from the experts. We'll take a look at a couple of significant statistical tools, so basically we're going to use the past to see if we can get a glimmer of the future. And then, the dynamic, seasonal climate models. They don't know anything about the past, they know all about physics. And, other than we start them off at some point, in this case about September 1st, and let them grind there through their equations to come up with, monthly and seasonal outlooks.

All right, so, in today's least surprising graphic, the forecast experts at the Climate Prediction Center and IRI at Columbia University. Have extremely high confidence that, El Niño will continue. In fact, a 100% chance right through the December, January, February, March season. Late winter season for the northern hemisphere, 100% chance of El Niño, as opposed to, either La Niña or neither, so the in-between category, neutral. That does start to appear there as we move into the northern hemisphere. Springtime. And even by, by, April, May, June, at least a sliver of a chance, in the expert's opinion, that we would have transitioned to, La Niña. But in the next several months, can't have any higher confidence than this forecast that we will have El Niño.

Now, what really, the really, the interesting forecast, of course, is the strength forecast, If you're on this call, you've undoubtedly heard about the Super El Niño. We prefer, just to call it very strong. Being, those kind of people, or at least I am. But, these graphics here, August is on the left, and the most current outlook is on the right. There's not much change between them. For the strength probability, those darkest red colors, the chance of a very strong El Niño. And you can see here, very close, though not quite to 100% chance in the very strong, category. Autumn, right in, right through the early winter season, even stays above, 70% chance there through the midwinter northern hemisphere season, but then decays rapidly. And that is a very typical evolution of these strong El Niños. Once they start to decay, they decay, quite rapidly, and you can see that reflected in the strength outlook there, for, that was issued September, which now goes out through April, May, June of next year.

All right, so some statistical guidance. We'll take a look at the long-term trends. The short-term outcomes here, sometimes called the optimum climate normals, and since we've got El Niño, let's see how El Niño has played out around the state. As a potential tool.

Alright, 50-year trends. October temperatures on the left, precipitation on the right. October. You can see here, 1976 to 2025, really extreme warming there across most of the North Slope into northwest Arctic Borough. This is, of course, strongly tied to the loss of autumn sea ice. But really, everywhere you look in Alaska, pretty much everywhere, we see some significant warming. The lowest color there is 1 to 3 degrees warming over the past 50 years. So, everywhere warming, but really extreme, in the north and northwest with the loss of sea ice. Precipitation is less monolithic there. We actually see, over the last 50 years, there is a weak trend to less precipitation across central and southern southeast Alaska, as well as portions of the Gulf of Alaska coast and in the northeast interior. On the other hand, generally a trend towards more October precipitation across nearly all of the Bering Sea region on up into northwest Arctic Borough, and at least on the northwest, or the Arctic coast, and portions of the Brooks Range. Most of these trends are not, very strong. Although, say, the Norton Sound area, as well as there on the Arctic coast and portions of the Brooks Range, those are pretty substantial trends.

Only really significant drying trend. Here is over in, northwest Canada.

Okay, that's the long term. How about the short term? So, here, the optimum climate normals, what we're looking at here is how have the last 15 years, so 2011 to 2025, what has happened in those 15 years, and how does it compare to the 30-year baseline normal that we're using? So, in this graphic, I'm using the I'm using the Alaska Climate Divisions, and if the average temperature or total precipitation in the 15 years falls into that significantly above or below normal category, then I shade it here for you. So, October temperatures, no surprise. North Slope. Trend, the last 15 years have fallen into the significantly above normal category of the 1991 to 2020 baseline, but so has the Cook Inlet Division and the Aleutians. For the October to December late autumn season, though, that drops out, and over the last 15 years, we see that only the Aleutians have averaged in that significantly above normal category. Precipitation on the bottom row. October, you can see a wet trend pretty much of the mainland, except for the Bristol Bay area, unless not really along the Gulf Coast, and over the last 15 years, the central and southern southeast climate divisions have actually averaged in that below normal category.

The October through December precipitation, so bottom, right here now. Still, still, last 15 years wet across the North Slope and the eastern two interior climate divisions. Now the, the significantly below normal average in the last 15 years in Southeast is confined. To the, Southern Southeast Division.

All right, so what's happened, during El Niño since 1970? We have 13, moderate and stronger El Niños have occurred since 1970, and so what I did here is I just analyzed what category, near normal, significantly above or significantly below. Did each one of those, late autumns. October through December fall into, and temperatures on the left, precipitation on the right. So this is kind of interesting. The first thing that catches your eye on the, on the temperatures is, of course, the red bucket of paint got spilled and, is all over the place. But, let me call your attention to that area of, white. So, where there wasn't a consistent signal. That almost invariably means there wasn't a consistent signal. Notice that, the interior of the North Slope, as well as in the Northwest Arctic, where the trend is strongest. Actually didn't have a consistent category here. Now, the normals that I'm using, the categories, do use the appropriate 30-year baseline. For each El Niño. So, in some sense, that's a, that is taking into account the trend. But it is interesting, and it actually was a surprise to me to see that inland North Slope actually did not have, that, splash of red as well.

Precipitation on the right-hand side is obviously much, much spottier if, you know, you kind of blur your vision. Maybe there's a trend towards wet across, the Gulf Coast. During moderate and stronger El Niños. In the interior, though, Bering Sea region, there's really not much, not much that we can say, that past El Niños have had a consistent, precipitation response over much of Alaska north and west of the Alaska Range.

All right, now our dynamic climate model. So, we're going to take a look at several things here.

Climate Prediction Center runs an experimental seasonal sea ice outlook model. We'll take a look at that. We'll also lean heavily on the North American Multi-Model Ensemble, more than 100 different model runs from half a dozen different model systems, as well as our colleagues at the World Climate Service and their processing of these seasonal models as well. So we'll take a look at sea surface temperatures, that sea ice forecast, and then temperatures and precipitation.

All right, sea surface temperatures here. On the left is the average from the NMME, so more than 100 different models, each one compared to its own ensemble system climate, not the real-world climate, so that helps a little bit with bias correction. The El Niño there stands out like a sore thumb, but notice across the North Pacific, generally above normal into the Gulf of Alaska as well. Little bit different there in the Eastern Bering Sea, as it's been much of the summer. Western Bering, though, forecast, well above normal. Now, how good are these forecasts? That's the graphic on the right-hand side for ocean temperatures, we want to see those colors in the purple, and we get those, of course, across the Equatorial Pacific, as well as the waters around Alaska. But notice east of Japan. Forecasts, run in the beginning of September for the late autumn sea surface temperatures have much less skill than, than around Alaska or in the tropical areas.

Sea ice forecast, so, This is 20 different model runs, and one of my favorite products that come out of this is, is this, average date that there will first be sea ice, of greater than 15%, so the average date of not open water. Now, this is a, this is quite an interesting forecast. One, it is showing freeze-up perhaps later than you might have expected across across the Beaufort Sea and northern Chukchi Sea. And it is significantly later than last year's model in having freeze-up in the, kind of, the central and southern, Chukchi, generally about 2 weeks later. So you'll notice that, that we have open water. Persisting until the first half of December, through the Bering Strait and into the southern Chukchise Sea, and open, the first, not open water, the second half of November, all the way up almost to Wrangel Island. However, once we do get that ice, this forecast actually has the ice moving south. Sooner than we, than this model did last year. So this has ice first reaching St. Matthew Island by the first half of January. And then, from there south, this model always has the ice getting to the Pribilofs.

It doesn't always do that. So that's, take that with several grains of salt. Timing of freeze-up in Kuskokwimquin. Bay down into Bristol Bay, the timing is reasonably similar to last year's outlook.

Alright, October, temperatures and precipitation. The way I like to do this, of course, I like to see how the forecast has evolved through time, that consistency through time, or lack thereof. Important tool for forecasters. Temperatures on top, precipitation on the bottom. And again, these are the outlooks for the three categories we're trying to forecast. So, October outlook that was made in July is on the left, August in the middle, and the most recent one made at the beginning of this month, is on the right. Just, eyeballing across that top row there, for October temperatures for Alaska, there's not a lot of change. Generally favoring significantly above normal, but the probabilities there and the color bars there, you can see, are not really high, although they're getting pretty high there in the Gulf of Alaska in the most recent forecast. But over land, there's not a lot of change. Generally, a warm forecast. Precipitation outlook on the bottom, the bottom row, looking across that, there is basically a whole lot of nothing for Alaska. There is no really usable information to inform our forecasts there.

Now, the World Climate Service takes two seasonal climate systems, the U.S. Climate Forecast System and the European system, and puts them together, but they do take another step that is not done with those NMME models, and that is they give greater weight to the model that has performed better. North American Multi-Model Ensemble, every single member counts the same. Here, the model that's done better gets more weight. When we do this, temperatures on the left, you can see Virtually all of Alaska favored in that significantly above normal category. Precipitation, now we've got a little bit more signal here than the NMME, but it's still not a lot. Maybe there's a little bit of wet signal across western Alaska there. Little bit of dry signal along the British Columbia coast, maybe, that tells us something at least about southern southeast. But, as usual, precipitation much less informative than temperatures.

Alright, turning to the October, November, December season, same setup here. Again, across the top row. Now, here we do see some changes. Back in July, the October, November, December outlook painted, favored significantly above normal statewide, but we see that is decreased. More white space there across western Alaska, both in August and September. Precipitation on the bottom row, still not much that we can really hang our hat on there. We don't see anything really consistent or close by that, would give us, something to favor, one of the, one category over the other two.

And the World Climate Service version. Now, again, here we see that, really, the warmth not extending for the season, or the tilt to warmth, not extending across western Alaska. We do have that, particularly in southeast, and at least a modest favoring of significantly above normal for the three months as a whole across, say, the eastern two-thirds of mainland Alaska. Precipitation, now we've got a little bit more signal here, the dry signal showing up there across the lower Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutians. We kind of lose that British Columbia tilt to dry, and don't really have much of anything else in Alaska, but at least at least for the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutians, do have a little bit better signal there.

All right, the last tool that we have, in the toolbox is, of course, what did the experts think last month? And this was the outlook, that the Climate Prediction Center came up with, in August for the late autumn outlook. You can see, again, eastern two-thirds of the state favoring significantly above normal, strongest tilt to warmth. Is in Southeast Alaska. Precipitation on the right, nearly all of the state, last month, CPC did not favor any category. Small area above normal there. Basically eastern Prince William Sound over to nearly Yakutat, and a small area there below normal tilt across the lower Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutians. But most places, no tilt in the odds.

And the answers, as revealed just yesterday by CPC, are, ta-da! October, so, You can see here, CPC did not go entirely with the, with much of the guidance in that they have carved out a fairly large area with none of the three categories favored across western Alaska into the interior, as well as southwest Alaska and out the Aleutian Chain. Above normal, though, favored, Anchorage, Fairbanks, on up to the North Slope. A lot of that North Slope tilt due to, sea ice loss. Strongest odds there, again, Prince William Sound over to about Yakutat, maybe Haines area, where, the, CPC has pretty high confidence that October will wind up above normal. Precipitation, again, for October, mostly equal chances. An area there, though, Yakutat over to Kenai Peninsula and the Cook Inlet area, as well as Kodiak, slightly favoring significantly above normal.

And the winter forecast, not a lot of change, a little bit, but again, favoring equal chances across western Alaska. Now, in this case, for the three-month season, that's, that is pretty much what we saw in the guidance. Highest chances for above normal, southeast Alaska. And then, tailing off farther north and west. Precipitation outlook is kind of interesting. Overall, it doesn't look too different than some of the previous forecasts. A lot of area of equal chances, but now we have this bullseye of below normal. For October, November, December, kind of over the central interior. Still have that area of above normal, but now extending back to the Kenai Peninsula area, and we keep that significantly below normal tilt. Across the lower Alaska Peninsula and Aleutians that we had in last month's forecast, and that we saw that in some of the guidance.

And looking ahead to winter, now we see that below normal tilt. Across, not just the interior, but a large chunk of the mainland. Still keep a small area there. Eastern Gulf Coast now extending into outer southeast, with a slight tilt to favor significantly above. Temperature-wise, it looks a lot like the October, November, December. Highest chances for above normal in southeast. No tilt in any direction across, western Alaska, and southwest, Alaska Peninsula and Aleutians.

So that is what I have for you this month. Here is our list of upcoming webinars. Got a good one here in a couple weeks. We're going to take a look at the 2026 wildfire season, not just in Alaska, but we're gonna bring in folks from Canada, really interesting, northern North America wildfire this season. So we're gonna review that, and I'll be back with you, coming up here in the middle of October for our next Climate Outlook webinar.

Edward Plumb
Great, thank you, Rick. I will open up the floor for any questions. I've clicked the buttons to allow you to unmute yourself or turn on your video if anybody out there has a question they would like to ask Rick.

Okay, while we wait, if anybody jumps in, Rick, there were no questions in the chat, so, pretty quiet day. And it doesn't look like anybody's popping in for questions directly to you, so, with that, As Rick mentioned, you can see on the screen there the upcoming webinars, and I do want to throw out there, if you have any webinar of interest, or you have research or something you would like to share, you can reach out to me. My email is there. And we're always open to new ideas, for upcoming webinars. So, with that, I will get the recording put up on the webpage later today, and I hope you all have a great weekend, and thanks again for tuning in this month.

Rick Thoman
Thanks, everyone!