A Week in Alaska: -46 Degrees, 186 MPH Winds

UPDATE: 11/18/09: Both Huslia and Bettles both fell to -46 degrees this morning. The NWS guy who sent me the graph from Sheep Mountain also said in an email: "We have a wind chart with the gusts pegging the meter at well over 200 MPH before the tower blew down. That was back in the 70's. The site is right in the path of a mountain wave that develops sometimes in strong northeast flow - what locals call a Taku wind." The CIMSS Blog has also put up some satellite pictures showing the cold temperatures:

Just doing a photoshop pixel selection on there, the lowest value is around -43 or -44, surprisingly close to the thermometer readings.

ORIGINAL POST (11/17/09):

The official NWS reporting station at Huslia, Alaska had a low temperature of -44 F this morning, and a "high" of -35 degrees yesterday. Here's a look at low temperatures this morning:

Other extremely cold locations this morning included -44 at Norutak Lake, AK, -42 at Arctic Village, AK and -40 at Beaver, AK.

Bettles, Alaska (the coldest reporting station I could find that we have climate data for) also had a low temperature of -44 F this morning, and a "high" of -27 yesterday. Now, this is Alaska and it's normally cold there this time of year, but usually just either side of zero at that station (-9 and +5 respectively). While it doesn't usually get that cold in the middle of November, the temperatures are certainly not unprecedented... Bettles dropped to -46 last December and -52 in January.

This early intense cold comes after extreme wind hit the southern tier of the state last weekend. When I first saw this report out of the NWS in Juneau, I thought it was a typo...

"WEATHER STATION ON SHEEP MOUNTAIN MEASURED WIND GUST OF 186 MPH AT 540 AM NOV 14 2009"

...especially when I looked at the Mesowest records and the station claimed wind speeds lower than 6 mph. But either the station's transmission to Mesowest was malfunctioning, or the NWS is using a slightly different Sheep Mountain station, but either way they sent me an actual graph of the wind speeds which looks credible to me:

This speed approaches some of the world wind records that I have talked about before and in fact is the same reading as the official land hurricane speed record (higher non-hurricane worldwide wind records are over 200 mph).

Other high gusts measured in the state over the weekend:

Cape Spencer, AK: 95 mph
Eldred Rock, AK: 87 mph
Thompson Pass, AK: 75 mph
Hydaburg, AK: 73 mph

By the way, the wind chill chart doesn't go nuts with higher winds... according to the NWS calculator, the wind chill for 0 degrees (which it was close to at the time of the reading) and 186 mph is only... -46.