Alaska Statewide Summary
July 2008 | Warm in the north, wet for eatern Interior and southeast panhandle
Circulation over the Alaska mainland favored dry weather for the first 10 days of July. Weak easterly flow developed during the first 5 days of the month. This favored dry and rather warm weather. On the Bering Sea coast, Nome hit 83ºF on the 5th - making it one of the ten warmest days in over 100 years of weather records there. Farther north, Kotzebue reached 80ºF on the 4th. Weak high pressure then built over the Interior at the end of the first week of the month. This brought some unusually warm weather in the Arctic on the 7th, as several stations reached temperatures in the lower 80's. The pattern changed, though, in the second week of the month as westerly winds broke through from Siberia and swept over the west coast of Alaska, bringing in frequent rainfall and cool weather.
The most significant producer of rainfall over the mainland was an influx of clouds from the Gulf of Alaska to the eastern Interior of the 28th and 29th. Over 5 inches of rain fell in the central Tanana River basin during the last 4 days of the month. Torrential downpours fell over the southeast Interior, but little rain fell west of Fairbanks. Eielson Air Force Base had 7.30 inches of rain for the month, the most for any July in that station's more than 60 years of records.

As a result of these series of onslaughts, nearly all of the state - except for the western Aleutians and the east Arctic - was cooler than normal. Precipitation was above normal in most of Alaska, especially along the Gulf of Alaska coast and in the eastern Interior. The impact of this cool weather on Interior Alaska gardens was considerable; residents observed that their gardens were running about 3 weeks behind schedule. On the plus side, insect levels in the Interior were well below normal for most of the summer.

The mountaineering season on Mt. McKinley ended after the first week of July. Clear skies over the mountain were unusually frequent and winds continued to be relatively gentle. The only difficulty posed by this pattern was snowmelt and weakening of snow bridges over crevasses - a process that produces danger to people hiking over such snow packs.

The forest fire season at the start of the month was becoming busy. A 10-acre wildfire in the Campbell Creek watershed, just southeast of Anchorage, grew rapidly, but strong control measures held the fire at bay and there was no damage or injury in a case where there could easily have been some. Another fire suddenly flared up about 20 miles southeast of Fort Yukon on the 4th, and was pushed along by a dry northeast wind. The smoke plume from this fire was easily seen on satellite imagery for about 2 days.

Interior thunderstorms were frequent from the 5th through the 10th. A total of 6,384 strikes were recorded by the Alaska Lightning Detection System on the 5th, which turned out to be the biggest outbreak of the summer. On the night of July 7th, a long lived series of thunderstorms broke out in Fairbanks, and continued well into the early morning hours and producing a memorable lightning display. Some later thunderstorms produced washouts on eastern Interior roads on the 8th through the 10th. Starting on the 11th, thunderstorms became small in number, and remained so for the rest of July. The fire season promptly slowed, and remained relatively inactive for the rest of the summer. At the end of July, less than 92,000 acres had burned statewide.

The heavy rain at month's end brought rapid change to some eastern Interior rivers, which had been running low during most of the summer up to the last week of July. The Tanana River near Fairbanks had a huge, rapid crest on the 30th, reaching its second highest level since the great flood of 1967. Flooding took place during the last days of the month at many riverside homes from Salcha to Fairbanks and Nenana. Over 200 homes were flooded and a many families evacuated the areas. Traffic on the Alaska Railroad was halted for several days due to some washouts of sections of the road bed. This event was a costly one as flood damage, mostly in Nenana, totaled well over $10 million.

Two Aleutian volcanos erupted during July. The first was Okmok, on Umnak Island in the eastern Aleutians. The eruption there began on July 12 and sent an ash cloud up to at least 50,000 feet. Ten people living at a remote cattle ranch on the island six miles from Okmok's summit made a hasty and successful escape to Unalaska Island, using a helicopter and a fishing boat. The ash cloud generally moved toward the southeast, and some shipping lanes and air routes affected by the eruption plume were closed for a time. Eruptions at Okmok continued for the rest of July. Mount Cleveland, located about 45 miles west of the town of Nikolski, erupted starting on July 22. Though eruptions continued there into August, their impact was less than the eruption of Okmok.
Statewide Extremes
Highest Temperature .88°F Dry Creek (5th)
Lowest Temperature .27°F Atigun River (30th)
Highest Average .60.6°F Fairbanks
Lowest Average .39.8°F Barrow
Most Precipitation .15.52" Port Alexander
Most Snowfall .1.4" Barrow
Where are these sites? Click here for a map.
Temperature and Precipitation Departure Maps
Click on the graphic for an expanded view. For a high resolution image, please email us.
The weather in Alaskan waters was a little more active than normal for July. Gales blew somewhere in Alaskan waters on 19 days of July. There were no shipboard incidents at sea, but several bouts of coastal erosion during heavy surf. The most active storm of the month formed over Siberia on the 27th and moved north through the Chukchi Sea on the 28th and 29th, reaching a strength of 977 mb (28.70 inches) on the 29th. At Wainwright, west of Barrow, west winds reached 50 mph, and the surf destroyed the seawall. To the east, near the Canada border, the surf washed away half of the runway at the village of Kaktovik.

The pack ice in Alaskan waters was near its normal extent for the first half of the month, but the retreat of ice in the Chukchi Sea was slowed in the second half of July. By month's end, all parts of the Alaska Arctic coast were clear of ice except for a short stretch near Barrow.

Sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska were around 2ºF cooler than normal in the east and near normal in the west. In the Aleutians and the Bering Sea, surface water temperatures were near normal in the Aleutians, from 2º to 6ºF colder than normal offshore the Alaskan west coast and near normal in waters close to the coast. Along the east coast of Norton Sound, surface water temperatures reached as high as 55ºF by mid month. North of Bering Strait, in the Chukchi Sea, surface waters were near normal south of Kivalina, and 2º to 4ºF colder than normal to the north.
Posted: September 9, 2008

Summary information is compiled and produced monthly by the Fairbanks Forecast Office of the National Weather Service and the Alaska Climate Research Center, with contributions by Ted Fathauer, Anton Prechtel, and Martha Shulski. Portions of this summary appear in Weatherwise magazine. Preliminary climatological data are used for the graphical products. For official data, please contact us or the National Climatic Data Center.