Funded by the National Science Foundation for International Polar Year

Arctic and boreal regions of the world store nearly 40% of the world’s soil carbon, and are warming rapidly.  Changes in vegetation and regional climate expected with global warming will likely alter the energy balance and carbon storage of arctic ecosystems, which has huge potential to feed back to climate by increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.  The US Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) program seeks to develop and deploy a pan-arctic observing system that will measure the full range of continuing changes now underway in the Arctic.  In this project, we will establish two flagship observatories in the U.S. and Russia, and form a pan-Arctic network of observatories through collaboration with existing projects in Sweden, Canada, and Greenland, wherein coordinated measures of landscape-level fluxes of carbon, water, and energy balance are carried out and the results made available in a unified database. This project focuses on simultaneous measurements of carbon, water, and energy fluxes of the terrestrial landscape at hourly, daily, seasonal, and multi-year time scales. These are major regulatory divers of the Arctic system and form key linkages and feedbacks between the land surface, the atmosphere, and the oceans.  We will provide a comprehensive description of the state of the regional Arctic system with respect to these variables, its overall regulation and controlling features, and its interaction with the global system.  In the longer-term, we will provide a legacy of data, a network of observing platforms, and a set of clear protocols for long-term observation and further analysis.  Education of students about these issues will be enhanced through a new UAF course offering, a “Field Course in Arctic Science”, providing undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities to participate in on-going arctic research in the field, in modeling and scaling exercises, and in analysis and synthesis of the data. 

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. UAF is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer and educational institution.