Except for far northern Alaska, the rest of the state has been on a cooling trend the first decade of this century.
Paper here.
Based on mean values obtained from temperature stations located around Alaska (n=20), there was a 1.3° centigrade decrease in temperature from 2000 to 2010, which the authors pointed out is a pretty large value for a single decade. While they also concede that 11 points is a small number of observations with which to compute a trend, and I would agree, evidently the trend held even when monthly values at the individual stations were considered. Personally, I’m not too impressed with the fit of that line to the data. But then again I don’t think one could fit a least-squares line to these data (with equal or greater r-value) having a slope of the opposite sign, which would indicate a warming trend over the decade.
Curiously, the mean temperature in Alaska had been increasing (from background mean) since about 1976 (see Figure 2), so this past decade is a reversal of that trend, something the authors postulate may be due to a change in polarity of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
Okay then.
All I know for sure is it’s unmistakeably winter outside, has been since November, and Maui in February can’t come soon enough!