It\u2019s a good kind of freak.<\/p>\n
October is normally Juneau\u2019s wettest month of the year, a cloudy, soggy affair that drives capital city residents indoors. This year is different: According to the National Weather Service office here, no rain has fallen on Juneau since Sept. 29.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the driest start to October and the most consecutive days without rain in October since the start of modern record-keeping at the airport in 1936.<\/p>\n
\u201cOctober is our wettest month of the year. That\u2019s why, as you\u2019re liking to say, it\u2019s freakish,\u201d said Kimberly Vaughan, observation program leader with the Weather Service in Juneau. \u201cThat\u2019s definitely the topic around here and the calls we get.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a normal October, 2.75 inches of rain would have been recorded at Juneau International Airport \u2014 the city\u2019s official measuring point \u2014 by Monday morning. Instead, there\u2019s only been a trace of precipitation \u2014 and that likely caused by dew and frost.<\/p>\n
Instead of overcast skies, Juneau has been enjoying an unbroken string of blue-sky days with only occasional tufts of white clouds.<\/p>\n
The unusual October extends across Southeast Alaska. On Annette Island, near Ketchikan, only 0.24 inches of rain had fallen by Monday morning. A normal October has seen 3.6 inches of rain by that point.<\/p>\n
In Yakutat, 7.24 inches of rain normally falls in the first nine days of October. This year, not even a trace of rain has been seen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a weak ridge over the panhandle, and that\u2019s kind of pushing all of the clouds out of the area for the most part,\u201d Vaughan explained.<\/p>\n
As the clouds go, so goes the rain.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe jet (stream) is actually positioned to where it\u2019s going down in more of the Washington state area instead of bringing in the weather to us,\u201d she said. \u201cUntil that ridge is able to move eastward or lose its amplitude, we\u2019re not going to get much of the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n
With no insulating layer of clouds, temperatures are spiking during the day and sinking below freezing each night.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re above normal on high temperatures, below normal on low,\u201d Vaughan said.<\/p>\n
The last time Juneau had an October dry stretch like this was 2012, when no rain was recorded between Oct. 19 and Oct. 30. That streak will be tied today and broken tomorrow.<\/p>\n
No October has ever begun so dry \u2014 the closest competitor is 1954, when it didn\u2019t rain between Sept. 27 and Oct. 7.<\/p>\n
The dry stretch is expected to last \u2014 at least in Juneau \u2014 through Friday, Vaughan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTuesday night into Wednesday we\u2019ll start seeing the clouds, and the precipitation will follow,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s likely to start along the outer coast from Sitka southward, particularly over Prince of Wales and Ketchikan, then gradually extend northward as the week progresses.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt finally starts taking a northerly push up through the panhandle Friday morning to where maybe Friday afternoon, overnight, is when Juneau would start seeing some light rain.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact reporter James Brooks at 523-2258 or james.k.brooks@juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s a good kind of freak. October is normally Juneau\u2019s wettest month of the year, a cloudy, soggy affair that drives capital city residents indoors. This year is different: According to the National Weather Service office here, no rain has fallen on Juneau since Sept. 29. It\u2019s the driest start to October and the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":31394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31393"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}