Climate Monitoring in the Central Alaska Network of National Parklands

Sousanes, Pamela; Hill, Ken

Climate patterns are key to understanding ecosystem processes, yet the available analyses, trends, and models for Alaska are based on relatively few observations. One of the fundamental ways the Central Alaska Network is helping to assess climate change is by deploying climate stations that record temperature, precipitation, wind speed and direction, soil temperature, relative humidity, snow depth, and solar radiation, throughout the parks. These new climate stations are providing critical quantitative data for current and future research and management decisions. There are several large-scale climate patterns and indices that are of particular interest to Alaska, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) which is an index of sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific Ocean. Typical winter sea surface temperatures during the warm phase of the PDO are warmer off of the Gulf Coast of Alaska moderating air temperatures over Alaska (Hartmann and Wendler, 2005; Keen, 2008). The PDO seems to cycle through a warm and cool phase every 20 -30 years. Temperature trends that have shown climatic warming tend to be strongly biased by a sudden shift in 1976 from the cooler regime to a warmer regime. Since 2005 the index has been predominantly negative and annual air temperatures have been near or below normal around CAKN – a possible indication of a phase shift from positive to negative. Unfortunately large scale changes such as this take at least a decade to confirm. The mission of the Arctic Network Inventory and Monitoring Program (ARCN) is to collect, compile and synthesize scientific information about the arctic network of parks in order to manage park resources "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations". The Inventory and Monitoring Program is a major component of the National Park Service’s strategy to improve park management through greater reliance on scientific information. In an attempt to better understand climate variation as well as long-term changes in park ecosystems, several new long-term climate monitoring stations are being proposed in the Arctic parks. The objective of the climate monitoring program is to monitor and record weather conditions at representative locations in order to identify long and short-term trends, provide reliable climate data to other researchers, and to participate in larger scale climate monitoring and modeling efforts beyond park boundaries.

Climate Monitoring in the Central Alaska Network of National Parklands

Program

Products

Collections