Arctic ‘bubble of cold air’ kept city in subzero deep freeze
The National Weather Service in Fairbanks on Tuesday confirmed what pretty much anyone who’s spent a few winters in the Interior might’ve been thinking: this winter was the city’s coldest on record.
A Fairbanks weather service office news release [issued Tuesday] spells it out. It says “we’ve edged out the legendary winter of 1965-66 to take the Number-1 spot.”
Three months of subzero temperatures have made the winter of 2025-26 the coldest on record. The weather service says the average temperature in Fairbanks from December to March was 13.6 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, making that period the coldest since records began being kept more than a century ago.
Meteorologist Bobby Bianco says the long cold spell began in early December and persisted until just recently. There were a few brief respites along the way in January and February, when winter storms blew through and dumped, in some cases, record amounts of snow on Fairbanks. But otherwise, it was just plain nippy.
“ It was just a cold pattern that we were in, because we had the cold stretch in December and January and then we had snow and then it came back in February through most of March,” he said.
The cold temperatures were caused, ironically, by warm air – located about 600 miles away, off the western coast of Alaska.
“ There was a ridge of high pressure aloft that was sitting over the Bering Sea,” Bianco said, “and that high pressure helped just pool the colder air over the state.”
The weather system just sat there for several months, funneling cold air from the Arctic into the Interior. And temperatures in Fairbanks hovered around 30 to 40 below for weeks at a time.
“So we just had a bubble of cold air that was sitting over us for most of the winter,” he said.
The high-pressure ridge finally gave way over the past couple of weeks, ushering in more spring-like weather.
Bianco says by the end of April, temperatures may climb into the 50s.
“ So, seasonably mild,” he said. “It's not going to ramp up super quick just yet, but we're seeing a gradual warmup through this weekend into next week and potentially the week after as well. So, we'll start seeing definitely more melting as we head into next week.”
Bianco says there’s really no way to predict whether we’re in for another cold winter next year. But he says this winter was so cold because of some unusual weather phenomena. And he thinks that’s unlikely to happen again next winter.
“I'm not going to say it's probably not going to happen -- but I am not going to say it's not happening, for sure,” he said, with a laugh.
He did, however, feel confident enough to make one extra-long-range forecast about the winter of 2026-27: “Yeah. It'll be cold in Alaska. Shocking discovery.”
