North Slope of Alaska

Alaska’s North Slope offers ideal locations to study the rapidly changing atmosphere of the Arctic. Compelling reasons to study the atmosphere at high latitudes include:

• The Arctic is warming more quickly than anywhere else on the planet. Recent decreases in arctic sea ice coverage affect how much heat from sunlight is reflected versus absorbed by the ocean.
• In the Arctic, ice (including snow) is the predominant form of condensed water most of the year. Ice and snow scatter, transmit, and absorb sunlight and radiant heat much differently than water.
• There is very little water vapor in the atmosphere, which changes how radiant energy propagates through the atmosphere and affects the performance of some instruments.
• The major “pumps” for the global ocean currents are at high latitudes, and there is good reason to believe that those pumps will be affected by changes in the atmosphere.
• High-latitude atmospheric processes over both land and sea must be characterized for incorporation into global and regional earth system models, and are typically underrepresented due to the sparsity of collection sites.
• Polar amplification will likely produce a larger change in temperature at the poles as compared to the average change of the planet as a whole. This will affect global weather patterns, likely resulting in more severe weather events at lower latitudes as well.