Alaskan Storm

Oooh, nature's power!:

The storm, which began hitting Alaska late on Tuesday after building over the northern Pacific Ocean, brought winds measured at up to 89 miles an hour and flooded parts of some Native villages along the coastline.

...“This is a storm of epic proportions as it’s being described,” said Jeff Osiensky, a meteorologist and regional warning coordinator for the National Weather Service. “This is kind of ratcheted up to a level much higher than we’ve been accustomed to.”

“I think this would probably be about a category 3 type hurricane if we were to do some sort of a similar comparison,” he said. “It’s on the line of a pretty destructive hurricane.”

...Powerful storms of this magnitude are common at this time of year in the Bering Sea and North Pacific, but this storm was unusual because of its northward trajectory and the lack of sea ice in near-shore areas like Norton Sound off Nome, National Weather Service and other agency officials said.

The last time a storm of a similar magnitude was sent in the same northward direction was in November of 1974, but the sea surface was much more frozen then.

Arctic sea ice this year reached the second-lowest coverage since satellite records began in 1979, and current ice coverage in Norton Sound and Kotzebue Sound off Alaska’s western coast is sparse compared to past years at this time, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“Forty years ago, a big storm like this would come through and the sea ice would act as sort of a buffer,” said Mark Serreze, director of the Snow and Ice Data Center.

“The Bering Sea has and always will have these strong storms. What is different now is their potential destructiveness as you lose the sea ice cover,” he added.