Marine Weather and Tide Forecast for Gustavus, AK

FXAK67 PAJK 141434 AFDAJK

Southeast Alaska Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Juneau AK 634 AM AKDT Wed May 14 2025

SHORT TERM
A couple changes to the ongoing short term forecast, but changes overall are minor and do not change the ongoing message: Wednesday morning is the break before the front moving in Wednesday night. Main changes are related to PoP, with the next upcoming frontal band to be slightly slower than anticipated, due to the current ridge over the panhandle being slightly more robust. Furthermore, run to run trends in deterministic CAMs show that the warm occlusion struggles to push past the coast mountains, meaning that a majority of the precipitation will be localized to the outer coast and southern panhandle. Now, this is not to say that only these locations will see rain, as the southeast to south orientation of the moisture flow aloft shows that even places in the northern panhandle will get accumulating precipitation. Rather, a bulk of the QPF will be directed at the southern panhandle and outer coast.


LONG TERM
By Thursday morning a respectable low will be enveloping the Gulf of Alaska, with southeasterly gale force winds expected. Mariners navigating our waters should use caution, especially in the vicinity of Prince of Wales and Southern Clarence. Here the long fetch from Dixon Entrance/Hecate Strait will drive fresh, short period seas of 8 to 10+ ft out of the south southeast. Winds reach their peak speed Thursday morning, diminishing later Thursday evening. Friday a broad Rossby wave will be organizing and moving south and east from the Bering Sea, serving as the parent system to a developing surface low ejecting into the Gulf of Alaska.
Simultaneously a ridge will slide across the over the Panhandle into Saturday driving some drier weather and lighter winds for the evening and into Sunday. While not as energetic as Wednesday’s system, expecting some onshore flow and shower activity to return later Sunday/Monday as cyclogenesis occurs in the western gulf.
Divergence in agreement between model guidance in position and depth of the associated surface low is resulting in a few different wind solutions for our coast, but buy-and-large expect south-southeast flow below gale force.
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