Southeast Alaska weather is known for rain if for nothing else. But summers are relatively dry, especially early summer (actually, the driest months are April, May and June). So… spring/early summer is statistically the driest time of the year, relative to the rest of the year, yes. But also relative to a lot of other places. Would you have guessed that June in Juneau is drier than June in these cities: Albany, NY, Minneapolis, MN, St. Louis, MO, Topeka, KS, Raleigh, NC? I could go on.

Juneau vs Topeka precipitation graph

Juneau is middle of the road for Southeast, by the way. Their normal June precipitation of 3.82 inches mediates between Skagway’s 1.42 and Ketchikan’s 7.02. Quite a range, and Ketchikan is not the absolute wettest place in Southeast, just one of the top wettest populated places.

Very wet spring peaked in May

2025 is turning out to be much wetter and cooler than the “normal” for the panhandle. This maps gets to the point showing how on a divisional basis all of Southeast Alaska and the Gulf Coast up through eastern Prince William Sound had the record wettest May. For more detail and what the adjacent months were like, read on.

Looking closer, the magnitude of the relative wetness varied quite a bit from place to place. Seeing a theme here? Thanks mostly to out spectacular mountainous terrain, things are not simple here, and your results can vary quite a bit over fairly modest distances. Here are the stats from 13 SE AK stations, listed from north to south (and heavy on north panhandle stations because that’s where the heaviest precipitation was).

Table of precipitation for April-June 2025 compared to averages for select Southeast Alaska stations. Amounts are in inches.

A little help on the above table if you are not already a hopeless weather statistic geek: I’ve given the amount of precipitation (rain and melted snow) each station was blessed with this year for each of the three months we’re talking about, then the long term average, and what the 2025 total amounts to as a percentage of the average. The rank column shows how 2025 ranks against all years with valid data (the number of those years shown after station name), ie a rank of 1 means a new record…2025 had the most ever. I highlighted with darkening tints of green the increasingly wettest months. Notice that May was generally the wettest, with the majority of stations getting much more than double their average rainfall. Haines was relatively wettest with 351% of average (8.43 inches), while Ketckikan was absolutely wettest with 25.58 inches, which was 290% of their average. For 9 of the 13 stations listed it was the wettest May on record. April was a record for 2 stations but still quite wet for most. June, with the exception of wet Yakutat (way north) and dry Ketchikan (way south), was near to moderately above normal, but so not newsworthy compared to April and May that I did not even bother to look up the rankings.

A cool spring to match the wet one

It’s also been quite cool around AK. Especially so in SE and also the northern 1/3 of the state. Check out this model reanalysis map for May giving percentile rankings:

No surprise here. Wet and cool are highly correlated in summer. Less so in April. Inversely so in the winter.

Here’s a graph showing this year’s (since 4/1) daily temperature ranges against the normal range (tan swath), and the record hot and cold for Gustavus. What’s important in interpreting this is to focus on the daily high temperatures (the tops of the blue bars). It’s the highs that effect us most in the summer. Cold daily lows are not as humanly impactful since they only represent a small fraction of the day and it’s when most people are snug in their beds, and when the overnight low is cold, the daytime high will be higher (with a high rate of certainly — just look at the graph). More on that in this previous blog post of mine.

Gustavus temperature Graph for April-Jun 2025

Some of the coldest summer days ever have been this year

On 6/13 the high was 48F at Skagway. I could find no other day in their history with a daily high temperature that cool. No 49s even. And that it occurred in the middle of the month rather than near the start adds to the amazement. So in plain language: June 13, 2025 was the one and only day out of the approximately 2,872 June days official records were penned (approximately 75% of days since the gold rush of 1898) that the high temperature failed to reach 50F in Skagway.

Corroborating stations: On the same day, the high was 47F at Haines coop station and 49F at the automated airport station. This level of chill only has happened on about 0.3-0.4% of all days in the record but is 1F degree shy of the 3 days that were only 46 in 1991, 1952, and 1938. It was 48 at the border station. Stations in other parts of the state have had some June days stuck in the 40s too: Anchorage, 48 on the 4th, Bethel 42 and Lake Minchumina 49 on the 8th, Valdez 43 on the 5th, and Sand Point (same latitude as Ketchikan and Copenhagen) 46F on the 11th. Don’t forget these are high temperatures.

More on the cold in these posts from the Deep Cold Alaska weather and climate blog: may-climate-data and update-on-cold

Thanks for reading. If you have questions or observations or advice on how to stay warm I’d love to hear it.