Alaska Science Forum
January 23, 2003Article #1630
by Ned Rozell
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
Wilfred "Wilf" Blezard
remembers the coldest recorded day in North America's history. Now 82
years old, Blezard was one of four
weathermen stationed
at the Snag airport in Yukon, Canada, on February 3, 1947. On that day,
the temperature dropped to 81 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
"We had six dogs that stayed outside the barracks," Blezard said over
the telephone from his home in Grande Prairie, Alberta. "Their breath
created quite a fog above them."
Blezard remembers tossing water into the air and watching it freeze into
pellets before hitting the ground, and listening to the magnification of
local sounds created by the severe temperature inversion.
"When a plane flew over at 10,000 feet, it sounded like it was in your bedroom," he
said.
On that day, Blezard and his coworkers for the Weather Service of Canada
filed a notch into the glass casing of an alcohol thermometer because the
indicator within fell below the lowest number, 80 below zero. When they later
sent the thermometer to Toronto, officials there determined the temperature
at Snag had dropped to minus 81.4 degrees F, the lowest official temperature
ever recorded in North America.
I visited Snag in mid-January 2003 with Jim Brader, a meteorologist with
the National Weather Service in Fairbanks. We found a ghost town. The airfield
that provided a home in 1947 to Blezard and three other meteorologists, several
aircraft mechanics, and a few radio operators now features one shell of a
log-sided building and an airstrip overgrown with balsam poplar trees.
Canadian and American construction crews completed the Snag airstrip in 1942
as part of a mission to create a series of safe landing places and weather
stations between Edmonton and Fairbanks. Much of the air traffic at Snag
was from American pilots who ferried planes northward as part of the lend/lease
program to the Soviet Union.
The Snag airstrip, located about 15 miles east of the border town of Beaver
Creek, Yukon, does not look like the coldest place in North America. It sits
on a plateau above the White River, 1,925 feet above sea level. Since cold
air acts like water and flows downhill, one might expect a lower temperature
in a place like Fairbanks, which is about 450 feet above sea level. Despite
its relative height, Snag is the all-time cold champion because of the terrain
that surrounds it, Brader said.
"Snag is an elevated valley but a relative low spot compared to the surrounding
area," he said.
Cold air that forms in the high peaks of the Wrangell and St. Elias mountains
drains downhill and into the narrow White River basin, where the Snag airstrip
is located. The high mountains also block the flow of warm, moist air from
the ocean. That limits the formation of heat-trapping clouds over the White
River basin, Brader said.
On February 3, 1947, there probably were colder spots than the Snag airfield,
Brader said. One site may have been the Native village of Snag, about three
miles north of the airfield at the low junction of Snag Creek and the White
River. The village, which was home to about 10 people at the time, did not
have an official thermometer.
"There probably were colder spots, but we don't have a lot of observing
sites compared to the amount of area we have," Brader said. "As far as
sites where observations were done, Snag was the coldest, but, undoubtedly,
there were colder sites."
For the record, Alaska's coldest official temperatures on February 3, 1947
reflected the cold dome of air that hung over Snag. Tanacross registered
-75 that day, Northway -70, and Fort Yukon fell to -68 one day later.
Since that February morning when the then 26-year-old Blezard witnessed the
coldest official thermometer reading in North America's written history,
Alaska has come tantalizing close to beating the record. On January 23, 1971,
weather observers at Prospect Creek, a pipeline camp 25 miles southeast of
Bettles, recorded Alaska's all-time low of 80 below zero. The temperature
at Snag was unavailable; Canadians had abandoned the airstrip in 1967.
Photo: Meteorologist Jim Brader of the National Weather Service office in Fairbanks, Alaska on his way to Snag, Yukon Territory, Canada (Ned Rozell photo).