Annie Feidt, Alaska’s Energy Desk

Weather conditions aren’t a driver of when fall colors appear, but weather events can drive the extent, duration and intensity of fall colors.

It’s like a dance, or an orchestra: Each piece of the grid watches the rest and responds second by second, millisecond by millisecond.

Brettschneider says this year’s Arctic sea ice retreat won’t break the record set in 2012, but is not too far behind. He says it’s strikingly low compared to two decades ago.

Fairbanks gets the first freeze of the season about a week early.

If you took all that water that has just fallen on Harris County and you put it right over the urban part of Anchorage it would be about 60 or 70 feet deep. It’s an extraordinary amount of water that’s fallen.

Most places in Alaska are wetter than normal for August, but it’s been especially rainy in Ketchikan.

August is the rainiest month in Alaska. But how rainy? That depends on where you live.

Juneau has had very few days above 70 this summer. In contrast, Anchorage logged its warmest temperature of the year Sunday, 76 degrees.

Less than ten years after oil started flowing, Alaska’s economy cratered. The recession was quick and deep. Ten banks failed, real estate values plummeted and tens of thousands of people fled the state. It was Alaska’s great recession, 20 years before the rest of the country went through almost the same thing.

In Alaska, we don’t pay income tax. We don’t pay state sales tax. But once a year every man, woman and child gets a cut of the state’s oil wealth. There are plenty of other oil states in the world, but Alaska is the only one that treats residents like shareholders and sends them dividend checks every year.