For the first time since it opened in 1998, the National Weather Service in Juneau held a community open house on Thursday.
“We want to reacquaint everyone with the National Weather Service here in Juneau, to let everyone physically see what we do and how we go about making a forecast,” said meteorologist-in-charge Tom Ainsworth. “And we go about making the forecast to keep everyone safe and out of harm’s way.”
The Juneau office, which operates 24 hours a day, has 15 forecasters, one hydrologist, three technicians and five administrators. The team puts out forecasts for public, marine and aviation interests. Its coverage area is from Yakutat to Hyder.
Many of its staff members were on hand during the open house. Set up outside its office building on 8500 Mendenhall Loop Road were tables with poster boards, handouts and equipment profiling different programs that the office manages, like the Cooperative Observer Program.
Volunteers throughout Juneau and Southeast Alaska are given weather equipment to measure daily rainfall, snowfall, snow depth, and maximum and minimum temperatures. Volunteers record the information, send it into National Weather Service and it becomes part of the national climate record.
There are nine cooperatives in Juneau — including in Lena Point, downtown Juneau, Douglas, Eaglecrest and Outer Point — and 32 throughout Southeast Alaska.
“They’re really helpful because it’s hard to know what goes on in some of these more outlying communities. For some of them, it’s our only source of weather information,” meteorologist David Levin said. “We have a coop in Hyder. We have no other gauge there. We have very limited satellite data. We have no radar coverage. The only thing we have is a web cam and a coop.”
The National Weather Service does a lot more than forecast the daily weather. The office keeps track of dam failures, lake and river levels, and jökulhlaups. From embedding with crews fighting forest fires to assisting with search and rescue efforts to tourism, the federal entity is often the hidden partner in many operations.
“For instance, the (Mount Roberts) Tram,” meteorologist Wes Adkins said. “The Tram is very much affected by any kind of lightning so we were on the phone with them (Wednesday) during the threat of thunderstorms. We had a lot of thunderstorms coming from British Columbia but none of them ever crossed.”
Starting next month, the National Weather Service Juneau will have a new website with a cleaner look and a simpler web address – weather.gov/juneau. And the word is, there will soon be a National Weather Service app.
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
