Scaling Studies in Arctic System Science and Policy Support: A Call-to-Research

摘要

A goal of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission is to assist U.S. agencies in establishing a national Arctic research program. In 2003, the Commission recognized the changes already happening in the Arctic environment because of climate warming and the need to synthesize available information, regardless of the scale at which they were collected, to predict impacts on the whole Arctic. The first workshops to discuss this required data synthesis were held in Seattle in 2003 and Woods Hole in 2004, and they brought together six experts in scaling up to the regional level through models of hydrology and of plant response to climate change. The next workshop, held in Seattle in 2008, included more than 20 experts in Arctic environmental processes and scaling in the fields of atmospheric modeling, ocean physics, biology, river hydrology, terrestrial ecology, and the interactions of human populations with climate change. This report, organized at the Seattle meeting, is not intended to be a comprehensive synthesis of existing data and models but instead is a call for action to fill the gaps in the knowledge necessary to reach the goal of developing an understanding of the effects of climate and environmental changes at the scale of the whole Arctic environment including their atmospheric, marine, terrestrial, and human components.