Helping Alaskans adjust to climate change
On the northern edge of Alaska, Barrow-area whalers have narrowly escaped drowning or drifting out to sea twice in recent years when the sea ice has broken up suddenly in the midst of a hunt. Despite the risks, hunting continues because people are desperate to get their nutritional needs met, says Arnold Brower Jr., who coordinates volunteer search-and-rescue efforts and also serves as president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, the regional tribal government.
Few places on Earth are more affected by climate change than the Arctic, where the delicate balance among ocean, sea ice, land, and air is shifting dramatically. The resulting uncertainty presents challenges to local communities as residents plan for everything from when to begin the spring or fall hunt for bowhead whales to where to locate new utility lines and expand the airport in Barrow.
Researchers at NCAR, CU, and the Georgia Institute of Technology are working with the Barrow community on the $2.5-million, NSF-funded Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Variability on the Alaskan North Slope Coastal Region. They hope to better understand and suggest enhancements to local decision-making in response to climate uncertaintieswhether natural or human-caused.
One year into the five-year project, members of the multidisciplinary team returned for a second visit this past August to work with Barrow co-investigators, gather data from local experience, and listen to the concerns of a community on the front lines of climate change.
For ESIG investigator Linda Mearns, the interactions with local stakeholders were invaluable. And, she says, seeing the environment was very important because it made clear to me how very delicate it is. With RAPs Matt Pocernich, Lindas applying extreme value theory to see if we can come up with more robust estimates of trends in extreme winds, using data from the last 50-70 years. She and ESIGs Claudia Tebaldi are also tackling results for the next 2030 years from climate model runs relevant to the region using mutiple scenarios developed for the last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.