Most of the sea ice is gone from Bristol Bay, according to the National Weather Service. That means their bi-weekly sea ice updates have come to an end. For more, KDLG caught up with Kayla Tinker, a sea ice meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage.
If you have something you'd like to share, let us know! Call 907-842-2200 or email news@kdlg.org.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Izzy Ross: KDLG has been airing bi-weekly sea ice updates from the National Weather Service to help people stay informed about what the sea ice is doing. It's kind of interesting to see that from a regional perspective on a very regular basis. It's still snowing and Dillingham, but as we kind of head towards spring, how did this year look compared to recent years?
Kayla Tinker: Sure. So when we're talking about recent years, we have 25 years of data, approximately, with our sea ice analysis. And that information is improving all the time as we get more satellite images to look at. So, you know, when I talk about different years, it's only pretty much back 25 years or so.
This year in Bristol Bay, we started seeing sea ice at the start of November. The past 25 years of data we can see freeze up as early as October 22, which happened in 1999, to as late as December 25, which happened in 2002. So this year was pretty much kind of on that earlier end, like I said, started November, end of October was when we started to see sea ice, at least in our satellite images.
Ross: So it seems like it's a pretty average year, is that an accurate way of talking about it?
Tinker: Well, we don't have that type of information in terms of climate. So it's hard to say if it was a normal or average type of year. And when we do we do a three-month outlook... we look back at different years to say, 'Okay, what does this year look like in terms of other years?' And a single other year didn't stick out to us in terms of like, oh, this year definitely looked like 2011 or something like that. We're looking at all the different years, at all different times of the season.
Ross: As you all were doing these daily updates and looking at the sea ice, were there any things that stood out to you or that you kind of noticed this year that were just curious or noteworthy?
Tinker: Yeah, so I always find Bristol Bay interesting, just because you'll start to see sea ice and it's forming. And then all of a sudden, like a storm will pass through and then you lose — you're eliminating all that sea ice that you just saw grow. And so that was pretty much the theme of the season, is we would see some freeze up and then we would see a good chunk of ice melt. And then it would just flip flop back and forth through most of the season this year. We did put out a post on Twitter for April 10. We had cold snap, and had expansive new sea ice growth within the bay. So that was unusual in terms of the data that we have for that time of year to have such a cold snap and to see so much new ice form on that day in April.
Ross: How did you all measure the sea ice? I mean, we were airing these updates twice a week, but you all are sending them out three times a week. Were there a lot of aerial surveys involved or was it like satellite imagery? What did that look like?
Tinker: Yeah, so we do sea ice analysis each day. And that entail satellite imagery, pretty much 100%. So in some of the tools that we use, it can see through clouds, but some cannot. So there could be days where we're not seeing Bristol Bay at all. So we cannot see the sea ice from our perspective of what is going on.
And then our forecast we do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that's a five-day-out forecast only. So Monday is going to be valid on Saturday. And those would be the types of things that we would be talking about in the radio interview, you know, what does the sea ice look like today? Hopefully we have imagery that day and we can see the sea ice. And what do we expect will happen over the next few days.
Ross: Are you all looking for any feedback from the public? Or is there anything else that folks should know?
Tinker: Oh, yeah, definitely looking for feedback as this was our first year doing the radio recordings in Dillingham. So any type of feedback in terms of what folks are looking for, especially whether it's on land or in the water. We have our website www.weather.gov/afc/ice, and that's where you can find our analysis and forecast. And there's also an online portal that is probably better for Bristol Bay, because you can zoom in. And that's AOOS. And you can find our maps going back to 2010 on there.
Ross: Thank you so much for taking a few minutes to talk and thanks for working with us and sending out the sea ice updates this winter and spring.
Tinker: Of course. Feel free to let us know in ways that we can improve and we're excited to go forward and do this again next year.
Get in touch with the author at izzy@kdlg.org or 907-842-2200.
