Weather Season

It looks like Weather Season is ready to rip

Ah yes, now I remember what the rest of the Alaskan year feels like. For a while there I was getting fairly comfortable in the Last Frontier, what with the 12 hours of sunshine each day. Well leave it to the Alaska Regional Headquarters of the National Weather Service to provide a backhand slap of reality. October marks the beginning of what I like to call weather season, which lasts from about October through April. You can tell it's weather season because the Alaska weather map on the NWS webpage begins to light up like a Christmas tree. Each color represents a different weather watch or warning. The mainland gets the exciting colors like red, orange and yellow, while the surrounding waters get deeper shades of blue with increased severity of the warning. I would like to see a time lapse of the colors on the map changing throughout the year. Today we got our first real weather advisory of the season - a high wind watch. Some areas of Anchorage are forecasted to feel 85 mph winds. The advisory suggests that people "secure all loose objects that could be blown or damaged by the wind." Meghan and I will batten down the hatches tonight, who knows maybe a power outage will precipitate a three day weekend. On second thought that could also mean a lot of rapidly thawing fish in the freezer.