With yet another immense North Pacific storm rolling into Alaska — complete with a closure of the Seward Highway southeast of Anchorage due to fresh avalanches, plus warnings of hurricane force winds and white-out blizzards by Tuesday night — let’s step back into the quiet before the screaming Chinook gusts and take stock of what winter has wrought so far.

Alaska just experienced its third warmest December on record, with temperatures averaging about 8.7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to the latest analysis posted by the National Climate Data Center. At the same time, the state was splattered with the fifth “wettest” December – most of that precipitation piling up in big white drifts that blocked on-street parking and choked residential streets to single lanes. 

Alaska’s weird warm-wet month was so unsettling, the climate agency listed it as one of the month’s most significant weather events in the nation. 

December average 4 degrees warmer here

In a remarkable contrast, much of the western U.S. was bone dry. California, Nevada and Oregon saw the second driest December; Washington was third driest; Idaho fourth driest. 

In Anchorage, where temperatures averaged 4 degrees F above normal to about 23 F, total precipitation was 71 percent above normal — most of that falling as 31 inches of snow, according to the preliminary climate report posted by the Anchorage forecast office of the National Weather Service. 

Anchorage also saw more than 32 inches of snow in November. And yet that month was bitterly cold — the third coldest on record, with an average temperature of 14 degrees -- or more than 8 degrees F below normal, according to the monthly summary at the Alaska Climate Research Center. (Alaska as a whole saw the sixth coolest November on record, according to the National Climate Data Center.)

The result? As of Jan. 8, Anchorage had accumulated 38.9 inches more snow than normal for that date, according to the climate pages at this link.  The city’s 81.9 inches is about 192 percent of an average winter’s early January yield. More snow may be coming soon.

So we get two successive months — one cold, one warm — both walloping southern Alaska with far above average snowfall and some of the strongest and most damaging winds on record. It has also smacked the Prince William Sound communities of Valdez and Cordova with building-crushing snow and tunneled streets — complete with a disaster declaration that brought in the Alaska National Guard to help with shoveling.

Alaska's weather as pulp thriller: Clash of the Oscillations

Big regional climatic patterns can work in synch to deliver wetter weather and more frequent storms to southern Alaska. But don’t look for a simple answer, especially when colossal North Pacific storms keep rolling ashore.