Brent Nakashook, an Inuit who lives in Cambridge Bay in the Canadian Arctic, doesn't particularly trust the local weather reports. Several times, he has called off weekend trips to fish for char or hunt musk ox after seeing storms predicted-only to find the Sun shining. "You've just shot your whole weekend based on the forecast," he says. The Arctic is warming faster than any place else on Earth, exposing isolated populations to erratic weather, prolonged muddy seasons, and thin ice. Yet in Canada, reliable weather and climate observations, already sparse, are dwindling further because of inadequate technology and cuts in the budget for weather stations. The trend frustrates northern Indigenous communities and threatens studies of how the Arctic climate is changing, researchers and residents say. "Can we reliably estimate how much snow has changed? I'm not confident we can," says Robert Way, a climate scientist at Queen's University. The overall number of weather stations in Canada has fallen by half since the 1980s, to levels last seen in the 1950s, because of budget cuts and an increased focus on satellite data sources. "They've fallen off a cliff," says Julian Brimelow, who leads the Northern Hail Project at Western University and until recently worked at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).
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