Our Work

Contacts

• Donna Hauser, AAOKH Science Co-Lead
• Olivia Lee,  AAOKH Science Co-Lead
• AAOKH website

AAOKH supports information exchange and environmental observations of cryosphere change by Inupiat experts in coastal communities. Community involvement throughout the development of AAOKH is ensuring that observations support key community concerns related to snow, ice and permafrost change. Concerns include impacts to food security, safety, and access to subsistence resources.

AAOKH provides relevant information and a user-friendly interface for coastal communities and stakeholders interested in the intersection of cryosphere change and coastal Inupiat community concerns.

Why is this work important?

AAOKH contributes to IARC efforts to synthesize observational data and helps build capacity in coastal communities by allowing them to help direct community observations related to their concerns on cryosphere change.

Integration of traditional knowledge with current science will help fill a need highlighted in the National Strategy for the Arctic Region, the Alaska Arctic Policy Commission, and recommendations of the Arctic Council Sustainable Development Working Group, thus making AAOKH activities relevant at state, national and international levels.

Contacts

• Sarah Trainor, ACCAP Director
• Tina Buxbaum, ACCAP Program Manager
• ACCAP website

ACCAP's work encompasses the entire state of Alaska. We focus on coastal and living marine resources, applied climate downscaling, water availability, sea ice, wildfire, tribal impacts, and community adaptation plans. ACCAP partners with stakeholders to inform realistic community plans and climate adaptation strategies using the most scientifically accurate, reliable, and up-to-date information.

Stakeholder interaction and outreach is integrated into every aspect of our work, including climate modeling and addressing regional vulnerabilities. These interactions include:

• Needs and vulnerability assessments
• User collaboration in downscaling models, designing research studies, and developing, testing, and evaluating research information products and tools.

ACCAP aims to establish partnerships among:

• Scientists and engineers
• State and local planners, policy-makers and governments
• Transportation, natural resource and land management agencies
• Native non-profit organizations and Alaska Native tribes
• Industry
• Non-governmental organizations
• Anyone whose decision-making is influenced by climate-related events

Why is this work important?

Climate change is already impacting the seasons, landscapes, and life in the North. These changes affect the health, lives, and livelihoods of Alaskans as well as the companies who do business in Alaska.

History and background

Established in 2006 with funding from NOAA’s Climate Program Office, ACCAP is one of several Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) programs nationwide. RISA supports research teams that conduct interdisciplinary and regionally relevant research to inform resource management, planning and public policy.

Contacts

• Alison York, AFSC Coordinator (primary contact)
• Sarah Trainor, Principal Investigator
• AFSC website

The AFSC strengthens the link between fire science research and on-the-ground application in Alaska by promoting communication between managers and scientists, providing an organized fire science delivery platform, and facilitating collaborative scientist-manager research development.

The area burned each year in Alaska varies widely, ranging from a few hundred thousand to several million acres. The extent and severity of wildland fire in Alaska appear to be increasing with climate change. Models indicate that this increase will continue: fire will feedback to climate by releasing stored carbon as greenhouse gases and black carbon particulates, and by exposing permafrost and speeding its thawing.

A fire burns in the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska.

Why is this work important?

Since 2004, wildfires have burned more than 38,000 square miles in Alaska — an area larger than the state of Indiana. Eighty percent of Alaskans live in the wildland-urban interface and are potentially vulnerable to wildfire. Smoke impacts public health, infrastructure, and transportation.

Alaska’s large proportion of public lands means that many fires are allowed to burn freely and play their natural ecological role. Wildland fire in Alaska is managed on an interagency basis by both federal and state agencies. These agencies are under continual budget pressures, and improved information to guide their decisions is one of the few ways they might increase efficiency.

Contacts

• Scott Rupp, AK CASC University Director
• AK CASC website

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers  (CASCs) provide scientific information, tools, and techniques that those interested in land, water, wildlife, and cultural resources can use to anticipate, monitor and adapt to climate change. The AK CASC is one of eight such centers located throughout the nation.

The AK CASC works to increase our understanding of how Alaska’s ecosystems and resources are responding to a changing climate. This is done by building partnerships between academic scientists, state and federal agency scientists, resource managers, tribal leaders, and decision makers.

We use these partnerships to anticipate, monitor, research, synthesize and communicate, and sustainably manage resources across Alaska’s diverse social-ecological systems.

Green Lake Dam at low water, Sitka, AK. (KCAW Public Radio)

Why is this work important?

Climate change is having—and will continue to have—a significant impact on Alaska’s resources and human populations. Furthermore, almost 90% of Alaska’s land is managed by state and federal agencies.

In order to provide realistic forecasts of potential changes and manage natural resources under future scenarios, collaboration and efficiency between state and federal agencies and the larger scientific community are essential. The AK CASC provides an umbrella under which appropriate research efforts and other strategies can be identified, and they support research in physical, biological, social, and integrated systems that can be applied to issues being faced by resource management agencies.

Barrow, Alaska.

Contact

• Hajo Eicken, IARC Director

Barrow is a major Arctic research region and platform. This region has seen some of the largest climate-related changes—especially in the cryosphere—and has an established research infrastructure to help with model development, exploring adaptation responses, and building resiliency.

This flagship site is meant to lead to integration and better coordination of a patchwork of observing initiatives. Work builds on a long history of collaboration between local experts and researchers.

Why is this work important?

There is substantial potential to enhance value and reduce costs of observations collected in the Barrow region for researchers in Alaska and the Lower 48, governments, local communities and the international research community through better coordination.

Contact

• Amy Lauren Lovecraft, CAPS Director
• CAPS website

Policy makers need reliable and timely information about the Arctic, a region of rapid environmental, economic, and societal change.

University of Alaska (UA) scholars possess a wealth of Arctic knowledge and expertise spread across multiple disciplines. CAPS is bringing together that knowledge and expertise to more readily serve policy makers in the Arctic. CAPS facilitates sharing of UA expertise in Arctic issues—ranging from natural resources to engineering to political science—with policy- and decision- makers.

Contact

• Uma Bhatt — CIFAR Director; Professor & Chair, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
• CIFAR website

As of June 30, 2018, CIFAR reached the end of its 10-year life cycle. CIFAR has requested and received a one year no-cost extension in order to allow currently funded projects to operate, as needed and appropriate. We are waiting to hear more about what funding mechanisms will be available for future collaborations between NOAA and UAF. 

The Cooperative Institute for Alaska Research (CIFAR) is one of 16 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Institutes.

CIFAR helps match Alaska’s research talent with NOAA opportunities in:

• Ecosystem function - Gain sufficient knowledge of Alaska’s ecosystems to forecast their response to natural and anthropogenic change
• Coastal hazards - Learn more about coastal hazards, storms, and tsunamis that affect Alaska's population, ecosystems, and coast to improve weather forecast and warning accuracy
• Climate change and variability - Foster climate research targeted at societal needs. Advance Arctic climate research to improve predictive capacity of climate variations affecting coastal regions and ecosystems.

CIFAR also facilitates collaboration between NOAA and academic scientists and partners in the private sector, local government, and tribal organizations.

Why is this work important?

This is a critical time for the Arctic, where rapid change coincides with shrinking research budgets, making the need for cooperation and coordination of Arctic observations vital in order to address anticipated environmental challenges.

CIFAR helps partner key scientists with opportunities at NOAA, contribute to integrating environmental information across Alaska, and as part of IARC can serve as a conduit for international partnerships.

Contacts

• Krista Heeringa, Program Lead
• CPS website

CPS partners with rural communities as they work toward their vision for self-reliance. We support community driven responses to self-reliance and sustainability challenges by identifying and linking relevant information and research support.

CPS was formed through UAF in partnership with the Alaska Native Science Commission.

Contacts

• Hajo Eicken, IARC Director
• John Walsh, IARC Chief Scientist

There is currently no international hub for distilling information relevant to Arctic change and making it available to broader audiences. This is an opportunity for IARC and UAF to fill a needed void at the boundary of Arctic science and outreach.

The goals are to establish IARC and UAF as internationally recognized “go-to” sites for current information on the state and plausible trajectories of the changing Arctic environment, and to highlight research and observing UAF activities by broader distribution through an “Arctic portal.”

Why is this work important?

IARC has strong partnerships with Arctic experts in Russia, Japan, Canada, Germany, Norway, Korea, and China. The combination of existing expertise, ongoing activities, and collaborations provides IARC with a clear path to the establishment of a synthesis center and information distribution capability that will attract national and international usage and support.

Contacts

• Igor Polyakov, NABOS Principal Investigator
• NABOS website

NABOS is part of the Arctic Observing Network and is funded by the National Science foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Since the early 2000s, NABOS has worked to compile a cohesive picture of climatic changes in the Eurasian and Makarov basins of the Arctic Ocean. Regular scientific cruises involving measurements of physical and chemical oceanography by means of moorings, buoys, and other instruments have helped NABOS researchers to understand:

• How boundary currents transport Atlantic Ocen water
• How Atlantic Ocean water interacts with shelf waters, the deep basin interior, and the upper ocean
• Changes in upper ocean circulation within these basins

IARC-led NABOS II 2015 expedition team installs an ice mass balance buoy and drills holes in the ice for an ice-tethered profiler and buoys in the East Siberian Sea. (E. Ershova)

Why is this work important?

The exceptional magnitude of recent high-latitude changes in the ocean, ice, and atmosphere strongly suggests a potentially irreversible shift in the Arctic Ocean to a new climate state.

These changes have important implications for the Arctic Ocean’s marine ecosystem—especially for those components that depend on sea ice or that have temperature- and stratification-dependent sensitivities or thresholds.

Addressing these and other questions requires careful observations. To these ends, expeditions provide key information about the historical transitions occurring in the Arctic Ocean.

Contact

• Bob Bolton, Institutional Lead
• NGEE website

The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE Arctic) seeks to quantify the physical, chemical, and biological behavior of terrestrial ecosystems in Alaska.

Initial research will focus on the highly dynamic landscapes of the North Slope, where thaw lakes, drained thaw lake basins, and ice-rich polygonal ground offer distinct land units for investigation and modeling.

A focus on scaling based on investigations within these geomorphological units will allow us to deliver a process-rich ecosystem model, extending from bedrock to the top of the vegetative canopy, in which the evolution of Arctic ecosystems in a changing climate can be modeled at the scale of a high resolution Earth System Model grid cell (i.e., 30x30 km grid size).

Why is this work important?

Increasing our confidence in climate projections for high-latitude regions of the world will require a coordinated set of investigations that target improved process understanding and model representation of important ecosystem-climate feedbacks.

Contact

• Brendan Kelly, SEARCH Executive Director
• SEARCH website

SEARCH is a collaborative program of Arctic researchers, funding agencies, and others that facilitates synthesis of Arctic science and communicates our current understanding to help society respond to a rapidly changing Arctic. SEARCH currently focuses on how shrinking land ice, diminishing sea ice, and degrading permafrost impact Arctic and global systems.

Why is this work important?

The convening power of SEARCH enables SEARCH’s interdisciplinary action teams, as well as the wider Arctic research community, to listen to and inform agencies, policy- and decision‐makers, and Arctic residents.

Contacts

• Scott Rupp, SNAP Director
• SNAP website

SNAP seeks to develop and communicate plausible scenarios of future natural and environmental conditions in an evolving climate. SNAP does this by developing an understanding of the climate's current and future directions, and then develops credible projections that inform policy and management across Alaska and the Arctic.

SNAP integrates current research and lessons from the past to help people manage uncertainty and make decisions about the future. We work with our partners and collaborators to develop information and facilitate the processes they need to think about and manage complex, real-world problems.

IARC Postdoctoral Fellow Katie Spellman and SNAP's Nancy Fresco explain the importance and relevance of computer modeling in making sense of climate change in this 13-minute video.

Why is this work important?

With climate change challenges on the forefront for many agencies, municipalities, businesses, and nonprofits across Alaska and the Arctic, stakeholders have immediate needs for the best science and knowledge available. SNAP provides a network within which research efforts and strategies are identified and supported to meet the needs of our stakeholders.

SNAP professional staff has expertise in:

• Planning:  We integrate information from multiple sources and help people envision different futures so they can make decisions despite uncertainty.
• Data analysis: We host and compile data and build visualization tools to analyze and explore system interactions and to ask and answer challenging questions.
• Communications: We interpret and communicate our results so that our partners and the audiences they serve can confidently plan for and respond to change.

Having a dedicated staff allows us to leverage each and every project in ways traditional research groups may not be able to. We strive to evaluate needs, deliverables, and requests across all projects, instead of through a single project-specific lens. This is a harder approach to take, as it requires foresight and planning, but in the end delivers a more robust, defensible, and broadly applicable product to our collaborators. It also allows us to share data, products, tools, and insights with a greater community of climate researchers and planners.

History and background

SNAP was established in 2007 by UA President Mark Hamilton to address stakeholder needs to address climate change challenges and opportunities. SNAP also plays an integral role in IARC’s mission to provide Arctic climate information, Arctic system modeling, analysis of human dimensions of Arctic system change, and Arctic science coordination.