Another Weekend, another wind warning

While Mother Nature may have taken a few days off for the holidays, she came roaring back for the weekend as the National Weather Service (NWS) again issued a high wind warning for Palmer, Big Lake, and Wasilla that is set to expire on Monday, Dec 29 by at least 9 p.m.

According the NWS, residents can expect winds from 35 to 50mph, with gusts up to 80 mph. The peak of the winds was expected to peak on Sunday, with reports of winds reaching over 80 mph in Palmer Sunday afternoon. Wasilla reportedly experienced similar gusts at the Glenn Highway interchange. The winds are not likely to not drop below 60 mph until late Monday.

The linemen at Matanuska Electric Association were again hard at work restoring power to hundreds from Trapper Creek to nearly 2000 members in the Greater Palmer along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, and continued dealing with smaller outages around the Mat-Su Valley.

So what is the deal with the ongoing high winds? The Mat-Su Borough is not immune to the high winds, but many comments on social media indicate that the high winds the residents have been enduring is unlike anything else in recent history.

Meteorologist Aaron Morrison, from Alaska News Source, shed some light on why the winds keep coming, saying that the consecutive weeks of high winds in the Mat-Su Valley (more so the Lower Matanuska Valley) comes as the overall weather pattern hasn't changed.

“We have dense, cold and dry Arctic Air in the Interior and Western Canada along with an area of low pressure in the Gulf of Alaska.”

Morrison says some areas of the Interior are dealing with the coldest consecutive stretch of weather in more than 3 decades, with overnight lows dropping down as low as -50. “This strong temperature gradient from the Interior into Southcentral and the Gulf of Alaska is driving these winds. The Matanuska Winds, as they are known, are more common in the fall and early spring months, but as we've seen in the past (Jan 2022 specifically), these events can occur during the heart of winter.”

Morrison further explained that winds are created due to strong thermal and pressure gradients across a region. The winds we have all been dealing with these past few weeks flow from an area of high pressure—the Interior, Copper River Basin and Western Canada-- into an area of low pressure. In doing so, the cold, dense, dry air is funneled through the mountainous terrain of Southcentral and leads to increasing winds. “These winds are more commonly felt in the Matanuska Valley, as well as near Valdez/Thompson Pass. These narrow areas of Southcentral, specifically the valley terrains and mountain passes, act like a tunnel and accelerates the winds as they drive through the gaps and passes. The stout ridge to our west is also helping to influence the pattern and lead to some persistent winds across the region, as the north to south flow is funneled through the region as well.”

Essentially, the problem goes back to both a ridge in the North Pacific and high pressure over the Interior are directly contributing to the winds in for us here in the Southcentral. That, coupled with the ridge out west, which is blocking any eastward movement of storms, is leading to cold, dense, dry air settling into the Interior region. This is helping to set the stage for the winds we have been dealing with, as the Arctic Air wants to move towards an area of lower pressure, which is currently in the Gulf of Alaska.

Unfortunately, Morrison says that the overall pattern looks to remain with us, as our ridge will likely hold out west, although shift more into the North Pacific and southern Bering Sea. There should be some easing of the winds, but those gap winds will remain. But predicting what Mother Nature wants to do here in the Mat-Su remains tricky, as we've seen with previous events, even winds of this strong will still cause issues across the Valley.

What does this mean for the foreseeable future? Morrison says that until there is a complete breakdown of our overall pattern, that subtle upper level disturbances could set us up for more periods of windy conditions. “That does bear watching as we welcome in the New Year,” he said.