Surface Climate and SnowWeather Relationships of the Kuparuk Basin
35
500-mb pattern was quite similar, with a cutoff low centered in roughly the same
location. This configuration had existed for the previous few days, with the
nearly stationary and vertically stacked cyclonic structure drifting very slowly
eastward.
Figure 13b shows the 1000850-mb thickness (proportional to the mean
temperature in this layer) and layer-mean winds for the same time. A tongue of
warm air extended out of western Canada over the eastern Arctic Slope of Alaska
and Beaufort Sea. The product of several days of previous warm advection from
the circulation around the Bering Sea system, this warm tongue continued to be
reinforced by warm surges in the SE flow for the next few days, resulting in the
warming event seen in Figure 12. Interestingly the cold pocket over the Upper
Yukon Basin south of the Brooks Range persisted throughout the warming event
experienced on the Arctic Slope. Further analysis (Olsson 2001) suggests that
this pattern is broadly typical of those producing the capping events seen in the
temperature and snow cover records. Examination of the full record for SAG
(19861998) shows late EC warming events occurred at least once in eight of the
twelve years where the data record was complete for EC.
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