ARCN Climate-Landscape Monitoring Network

I have recently been funded by the National Park Service to develop and implement a network to monitor climate change and its impacts on the physical landscape within their Arctic Network (ARCN) of National Parks, Preserves and Monuments in Alaska. As part of this, I will install about 10 long-term automated climate reference stations to detect trends in air temperature, winds, soil temperatures and other climate variables. This project is a big deal, because there are currently no such measurements being made within these parks, which are three times larger than New Jersey and are likely experiencing the greatest changes in climate of nearly anywhere on the planet. I hope that these stations form the nucleus of a much broader network throughout arctic Alaska, as there are only a few long-term records in this gigantic area. I hope to deploy about 3 stations a year for the next 3 years, as well as conduct an annual snow-machine traverse to measure snow-pack and begin a new glacier monitoring program. This effort is part of the endorsed IPY project called IASOA.

These five park units are roughly the same size as Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire combined, yet there are no weather stations designed for long-term climate observations here.

I convened a workshop with 20 scientists and park managers to help develop a feasible, long-term plan for this work. The workshop was quite successful, and we left feeling like we had accomplished this. You can find the final report from this workshop here, which will give you lots of background on this project and a description of the plan we developed.

Standing, left to right: Matt Nolan, Tom Heinlein, Bruce Peterson, Mary Booth, Chris Daly, Bruce Baker, Darrell Kaufman, John Cassano, and Kenji Yoshikawa. Kneeling, left to right: Diane Sanzone, Andrew Balser, Frank Urban, Cathy Cahill, Bud Rice, Jason Geck, Matthew Sturm, and Martha Shulski. Attending but not in picture: Pam Sousanes, Kelly Redmond, and Tom Hamilton.