United States officials today announced the release of an Arctic Meteorological and Climate Atlas, which contains some previously restricted U.S. and Russian data, at a meeting of the Arctic Council in Barrow, Alaska.
The atlas series was created by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder-headquartered National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, the University of Washington, Seattle聮s Polar Ice Center and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. The project is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S.聳Russian Binational Commission聮s Environmental Working Group.
"The Arctic Meteorology and Climate Atlas series contains climate measurements from one of the most forbidding places on Earth," said Florence Fetterer, an NSIDC project manager and an atlas series project coordinator.
The Arctic Council includes representatives from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden and the United States. Other organization members include the Association of Indigenous Minorities of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, the Saami Council, and the Aleutian International Association.
The breadth and length of the records provided by the atlas series are anticipated to be of particular value to climate change studies. Since the severe Arctic climate poses extreme risks and logistical hazards to field crews, contemporary studies of arctic climate rely on satellite remote sensing.
"The new climate atlas series provides nearly a century of 聭ground truth聮 data used to calibrate and gauge the validity of satellite data over later periods," she said. "This allows researchers to discern permanent changes from seasonal or cyclical shifts."
In addition, it contains regional maps of air temperature, sea level pressure, precipitation, cloud cover, snow depth, and global solar radiation supply that can be used to model the physical exchange processes between sea ice, atmosphere and ocean, Fetterer said.
The CD-ROM atlas includes both historical and new data. They range from observations taken from the 1893 expedition of the Norwegian ship, "Fram," to those collected from T-3, a scientific research camp operated from the 1950s through the 1970s by the U.S. Air Force on a floating ice island drifting in the Beaufort Gyre.
In addition to summarizing the history of arctic exploration by Russian and U.S. researchers, the atlas series includes an article about native Inuit climate by CU-Boulder graduate student Shari Fox. After interviewing Inuit hunters, elders and others living in the northern polar region, Fox reports the increasing incidence of rainfall in recent years sparked the creation of a new Inuktitut word. The word, "misullijuq," describes a mix of rain and snow that denotes an increase in the amount of rain in winter.
Other highlights of the atlas include a description of the Russian North Pole drifting station program and a monograph on weather hazards in the Russian Arctic, both translated from the Russian. The atlas also contains a photo gallery from early North Pole stations, an arctic weather primer, and an English-Russian glossary of meteorological terms.
The atlas is one in a series produced in response to a mandate by the Environmental Working Group established in 1995 under the U.S.-Russian Binational Commission to exchange data between the two countries. Since then, the commission has expanded its scope to include other areas of U.S.-Russian cooperation, such as business development, defense conversion, health, science, the environment and agriculture.
The atlas is available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Campus Box 449, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309. NSIDC also distributes other volumes in the series. For a complete description of the atlases, see the Web site or contact the NSIDC User Services Office at nsidc@kryos.colorado.edu.
NSIDC is a center within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. See the NSIDC Web site: for further information.