thu, 02-may-2013, 07:52
Still snowing

In a post last week I examined how often Fairbanks gets more than two inches of snow in late spring. We only got 1.1 inches on April 24th, so that event didn’t qualify, but another snowstorm hit Fairbanks this week. Enough that I skied to work a couple days ago (April 30th) and could have skied this morning too.

Another, probably more relevant statistic would be to look at storm totals rather than the amount of snow that fell within a single, somewhat arbitrary 24-hour period (midnight to midnight for the Fairbanks Airport station, 6 AM to 6 AM for my COOP station). With SQL window functions we can examine the totals over a moving window, in this case five days and see what the largest late season snowfall totals were in the historical record.

Here’s a list of the late spring (after April 21st) snowfall totals for Fairbanks where the five day snowfall was greater than three inches:

Late spring snow storm totals
Storm start Five day snowfall (inches)
1916-05-03 3.6
1918-04-26 5.1
1918-05-15 2.5
1923-05-03 3.0
1937-04-24 3.6
1941-04-22 8.1
1948-04-26 4.0
1952-05-05 3.0
1964-05-13 4.7
1982-04-30 3.1
1992-05-12 12.3
2001-05-04 6.4
2002-04-25 6.7
2008-04-30 4.3
2013-04-29 3.6

Anyone who was here in 1992 remembers that “summer,” with more than a foot of snow in mid May, and two feet of snow in a pair of storms starting on September 11th, 1992. I don’t expect that all the late spring cold weather and snow we’re experiencing this year will necessarily translate into a short summer like 1992, but we should keep the possibility in mind.

tags: Fairbanks  snow  weather 
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