National Weather Service Will Cut Rural Alaska Staff By Two-Thirds
NWS is replacing manual weather balloon launches with Finnish-made automatic launchers in its 12 rural-Alaska weather stations.
Shrinking Sea Ice
KNOM airs three daily reports of sea ice location in Western Alaska. This information has been especially important lately, as local sea ice cover has continued to decline, year over year, bringing severe impacts to our listeners.
Climate and Weather Data Show Significant Changes In Nome, Bering Sea, and Alaska
National Weather Service observations show that, since 1900, water temperatures in the Bering Sea between June and August have been gradually rising. With that in mind, NWS says a weak to moderate La Niña is possible in Alaskan waters this winter.
AM Transmitter Woes
KNOM’s AM transmitter, now in its third decade of service, is nearing the end of its usable life. As multiple outages in recent months have shown, the time has come to replace it.
Smoke in the Sky!
Daily life in Alaska is predictably unpredictable, and this summer’s weather in Western Alaska was no exception.
Keeping the station warm
It might seem like a routine or prosaic replacement, but for a radio station in the sub-Arctic, it’s utterly crucial: last month, KNOM replaced the boiler in its studios (as pictured, mid-replacement, above). Our studio boiler, which generates the heat for the ambient temperature of the building, had been in need of a permanent fix […]
Iditarod: a red-letter year
As part of our April 2014 newsletter, take a look back at an incredible, exceptional Iditarod: both for our radio mission and for the Last Great Race itself.
A very strange winter thaw
The streets looked like springtime, and the air was so warm – by Alaskan standards, at least – it might have been mistaken for summer. But the date wasn’t in May or June; it was late January. On January 27th, Nome broke a high temperature record not just for the day, but for the winter […]
Three years ago, ten years ago
While Nome has experienced a relatively warm winter this year – with widespread melting and relatively little snow to speak of – winter in our region is, as you might expect, often the opposite. Here are two examples. In 2011, only three years ago, our snow cover – and our exposure to heavy winter storms […]
The polar vortex
With regards to weather, 2014 got off to a very strange start all throughout the United States: in Alaska as well as in the Lower 48, albeit for opposite reasons. In many places in the contiguous 48 states, a “polar vortex” weather pattern was causing abnormally frigid temperatures in early January, while in Alaska, Nome […]