For those of you in southeast Alaska, you know how wet and rainy this summer has been, especially compared to the last several years. While we may have been spoiled with those warm, sunny summers, ecologically speaking they were not what southeast Alaska needs. Being home to the world’s largest temperate rain forest means we typically get, and need, a lot of rain. An abundance of rain means our forests are nice and lush, the wild berries are blooming like crazy, and the rivers have plenty of water for our salmon.
If you’ve been getting the newsletter for a while, you have probably read about Tipping Buckets, our citizen science project that tracks real-time rainfall amounts around Sitka. While the idea of these buckets is to help determine which areas might be at risk for landslides, they are providing Sitka with some fun data. You can actually see the differences in rainfall across neighborhoods, not just looking at overall averages for Sitka. Do areas around Halibut Point Road get more rain, or is Sawmill Creek wetter? How about the downtown area, or up Harbor Mountain? To see this data for yourself, click here and scroll to AK023.
While this July wasn’t “normal” in many ways, we still had a lot going on. To read all about what is happening, please click here.
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