It won\u2019t make the skiers happy to hear it, but Juneau\u2019s early snow is no guarantee of a snowy winter. In fact, the reverse might be true.<\/p>\n
According to figures compiled by the National Weather Service here, this year\u2019s Oct. 16 snowfall was the sixth-earliest recorded in Juneau since 1936. The 5.1 inches that fell on the airport marked the first time since 1940 that Juneau had snow before Fairbanks.<\/p>\n
Between 1945 and 2015, Juneau averaged 95.6 inches of snow every winter. Recent winters have been far below that figure, but so have winters with early snowfall. Of the five years with first snowfall before this year, three were well below normal, one was close to normal, and one was above normal.<\/p>\n
\u2022 In 2000, 2 inches of snow fell on Oct. 2, but the winter went on to have Juneau\u2019s second-least snow ever; only 28.7 inches fell at the airport.<\/p>\n
\u2022 In 1997, 1.9 inches of snow fell on Oct. 13. This was another bad winter for snowfall, with only 35.6 inches at the airport \u2014 the city\u2019s fifth-lowest total. (Last winter was No. 4.)<\/p>\n
\u2022 In 1974, 0.8 inches fell on Oct. 2. That winter was close to normal, with 101.3 inches of snow.<\/p>\n
\u2022 In 1958, 0.9 inches fell on Oct. 7. That winter ended up having 127.8 inches of snow.<\/p>\n
\u2022 In 1939, 4 inches fell on Oct. 6. That winter went on to record 58.6 inches of snow, less than 60 percent of normal.<\/p>\n
Since the winter of 2009-2010, Juneau has had an average 1945-2015 snowfall only twice.<\/p>\n
While those precedents are cold comfort to skiers and snow-lovers, those who love winter can be heartened by the fact that under proper statistical analysis, there\u2019s almost no correlation between early snow and low (or high) seasonal totals. In other words, using just five data points isn\u2019t enough (over 80 years of data) to draw a trend.<\/p>\n
The latest weather service forecast shows no sign of snow in the immediate future \u2014 or rain, for that matter. Sunny or partly sunny weather is expected to continue through Thursday, and given the dry start to October, Juneau is well on its way to another record of note \u2014 the driest October in recorded history.<\/p>\n
Through Monday evening, just 2.5 inches of precipitation (rain and melted snow) had been recorded at the airport. In a normal month, Juneau would have seen 6.68 inches during that time. The record for driest October is held by 1950, which saw just 3.28 inches of precipitation \u2014 none of it snow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It won\u2019t make the skiers happy to hear it, but Juneau\u2019s early snow is no guarantee of a snowy winter. In fact, the reverse might be true. According to figures compiled by the National Weather Service here, this year\u2019s Oct. 16 snowfall was the sixth-earliest recorded in Juneau since 1936. The 5.1 inches that fell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"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-9417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9417","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\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9417"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=9417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}