Chinook For The Books

It's so cold on the East Coast! It's so cold in the Midwest!

Tell it to the Alaskans, who finally saw the crystalline air in their Frozen Hell move somewhere else for a change:

The temperature at Fairbanks International Airport hit a record high of 44 degrees just before midnight on Wednesday, continuing what has been a dramatic warm-up following one of the worst cold snaps in decades.

On Sunday, the final day of a cold spell that kept residents in Alaska’s second-largest city shivering for 16 days straight, the low temperature at the airport was negative 44. That’s a difference of 88 degrees in just three days.

“Incredible,” said meteorologist Rick Thoman at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks. “Is there any other place in the country that can do that?

“It’s just a spectacular chinook,” he said.

The temperature at Eielson Air Force Base hit 50 degrees just after midnight Wednesday, setting a new all-time record high for January at the military base 25 miles southeast of Fairbanks.

In Nenana, the temperature climbed to 54 degrees Thursday morning, another all-time high, Thoman said.

The 44-degree reading at the airport late Wednesday broke the record of 43 degrees set in 1981. Thursday’s high of 45 degrees in Fairbanks fell 5 degrees short of a record of 50 degrees set in 1981.

Other notable warm temperature readings were 54 at Birch Lake; 52 in Salcha; 48 in Healy; 46 in Denali Park; and 45 in Central, the latter two of which set new daily records.

“There’s July days when it’s not that warm at Birch Lake,” Thoman quipped.

Things cooled off at the airport by the afternoon — 27 degrees at 4 p.m. — but above-freezing temperatures and melting snow persisted throughout the day in much of the Fairbanks area.

The blast of warm air is the result of strong south winds pushing across the Alaska Range, Thoman said.

“The south winds busted through,” he said. “That warm air was aloft, and it was just a matter of getting it down to the ground.”

Overnight winds near 70 mph were recorded on Eagle Summit, and gusts of 40 mph were recorded at Eielson.

The chinook comes on the heels of a cold snap in which the low temperature hit 40 below on 14 of 16 days and the high temperature never rose above 20 below.

“It seems like so often we have these deep cold spells, and they end with a bang,” Thoman said, noting that was the case with the legendary cold snap of January 1989.