A lone canoeist at Ballaine Lake in Fairbanks
on a smoky summer day in 2004.
Photo by Ned Rozell, from The Climate of Alaska
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
If you like gardening, you might scratch Barrow off your list of places to live. Alaska’s farthest north town experiences about 10 frost-free days each year. Also, you would have trouble watering your plants there, especially in 1934, when an Alaska-record low 1.4 inches of precipitation fell — all year.
In stark contrast, your broccoli would have needed an umbrella in Angoon on an October day in 1982, when 15 inches of rain fell. And you probably needed more than a shovel if you were driving through Thompson Pass at the end of December in 1955, when more than five feet of snow fell in one day.
On the bright side for Barrow, its citizens are gaining 15 minutes of sunlight every day right now, in early February, while Annette in Southeast Alaska gains just four minutes per day. And Barrow is also a great place to fly a kite; the town experiences calm conditions just one percent of the time.
I know these things because I own a copy of The Climate of Alaska , a book by Martha Shulski and Gerd Wendler, two climatologists who work for the Alaska Climate Research Center.