A wet weather system is headed towards Sitka at a time when local rainfall data is spottier than usual.
The rain gauge at Sitka’s airport is down. That gauge provides data to help determine the current risk for local landslides, which is published in real time on Sitka’s Landslide Warning Dashboard. Arleigh Reynolds is the Executive Director of the Sitka Sound Science Center. At the Sitka Assembly meeting on Tuesday (10-28-25), he said without the data from the airport, real-time rain readings and subsequent risk levels on the dashboard could be a bit lower than normal.
“And so I just wanted to make people aware of that, and to just stay in tune to the forecast and to what’s actually happening over the next few days, as we’re about to go into another atmospheric river,” Reynolds said. “We hope that once the government shutdown changes, we will probably have that data back and available.”
In an interview on Wednesday, Reynolds told KCAW that the rain gauge data has been spotty since August. The gauge data was down on September 10, when heavy rains triggered a small landslide on Cascade Creek Road. Reynolds said a request for maintenance has been submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration. Right now there’s no clear timeline for when it could be repaired.
However, Reynolds said that the “forecast” section of the landslide dashboard is still up-to-date. It uses weather data from the National Weather Service in Juneau to predict rain levels up to a couple of days in advance. He encouraged Sitkans to remain vigilant in times of heavy rainfall and visit www.weather.gov/ajk for the most current weather forecast information.
