Most of Southeast Alaska is being drenched in rain today, and another large, warm and wet weather system sits just offshore waiting to plow into the region.
It’s expected to bring heavy rain and high winds through the rest of the week. Due to the already above average temperatures and rainfall so far this winter, Joel Curtis with the National Weather Service in Juneau says this latest system will increase chances for landslides and mudslides in Southeast.
“We’ve had a moist flow aimed at us for most of the winter so far and then this thing is just putting more rain on top of that. We just have a real ‘watch out’ condition,” Curtis says.
Curtis issued a landslide warning Monday night. He’s forecasting most areas of Southeast will get up to an inch and half of rain Tuesday, followed by up to two inches overnight and more on Wednesday. The system also will bring high winds, expected to reach 40 to 50 miles per hour in many areas.
Curtis says those conditions are ripe for landslides.
“If you combine a lot of precipitation with wind, your (tree) trunks are moving, therefore your root systems are moving and it’s much easier to get a blow down in these extremely moist conditions like we have right now,” he says. “So, when you start moving those root systems around and then you put some good gusts of wind on it, that’s one of the ways we try to look out for landslides and mudslides.”
He warns that with such a large system, it’s difficult to be precise about what areas are most susceptible to landslides.
“We don’t have the detailed knowledge of saying ‘OK, it’s going to happen along a certain road or certain clear-cut.’ We don’t have that knowledge,” he says. “So we have to be very, very general when we put that in our special weather statement.”
Curtis says the alerts will be updated as the impending weather system moves over the panhandle. He says the only community in Southeast not included in the landslide warning at this time is the Yakutak area.
