Case Studies of High Wind Events in Barrow, Alaska: Climatological Context and Development Processes

• Main Authors: Amanda H. Lynch, Elizabeth N. Cassano, John J. Cassano, Leanne, R. Lestak
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; East Siberian Sea; Archipelago; Arctic Basin; Barrow; Beaufort Sea; Canadian Archipelago; Chukchi; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.504.6889; http://nome.colorado.edu/HARC/Publications/Lynchetal2003.pdf

The Beaufort–Chukchi cyclones of October 1963 and August 2000 produced the highest winds ever recorded in Barrow, Alaska. In both cases, winds of 25 m s21 were observed with gusts unofficially reported at 33 m s21. The October 1963 storm caused significant flooding, contaminated drinking water, and interrupted power supplies. The August 2000 storm caused the wreck of a $6 million dredge, and removed roofs from 40 buildings. Both storms were unusual in that they tracked eastward from the East Siberian Sea into the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, rather than following a more typical northward track into the Arctic Ocean. This paper addresses, through modeling and analysis, the development processes of these two storms. The October 1963 system was a long-lived, warm core, zonally elongated cyclone that traversed around the Arctic basin through the Canadian Archipelago. The August 2000 system was an open-wave cyclone that dissipated rapidly into a weak, cold core eddy in the Alaskan sector of the Beaufort Sea. Approximating the contributions to development using terms in a quasigeostrophic omega equation, it was found that both storms were char-acterized by the increasing importance of the convergence of the Q vector (representing differential vorticity advection and thermal advection) in the midtroposphere, at the expense of forcing by the turbulent fluxes of heat, moisture, and momentum in the boundary layer. However, the influence of surface turbulent fluxes in the