HR: 16:45h
AN: ED34A-04    [Abstracts]
TI: Communicating Climate and Ecosystem Change in the Arctic
AU: Soreide, N N
EM: nancy.n.soreide@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 United States
AU: * Overland, J E
EM: james.e.overland@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 United States
AU: Calder, J A
EM: john.calder@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA Arctic Research NOAA/OAR HQTRS, 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1225, Silver Spring, MD 20910 United States
AU: Rodionov, S
EM: sergei.rodionov@noaa.gov
AF: JISAO/University of Washington, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 United States
AB: There is an explosion of interest in Northern Hemisphere climate, highlighting the importance of recent changes in the Arctic on mid-latitude climate and its impact on marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Traditional sea ice and tundra dominated arctic ecosystems are being reorganizing into warmer sub-arctic ecosystem types. Over the previous two years we have developed a comprehensive, near real-time arctic change detection protocol to track physical and biological changes for presentation on the web: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/detect. The effort provides a continuous update to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) Report, released in November 2004. Principles for the protocol include an accessible narrative style, scientifically credible and objective indicators, notes multiple uses for the information, acknowledges uncertainties, and balances having too many indicators-which leads to information overload-and too few-which does not capture the complexity of the system. Screening criteria include concreteness, public awareness, being understandable, availability of historical time series, and sensitivity. The site provides sufficient information for an individual to make their own assessment regarding the balance of the evidence for tracking change. The product provides an overview, recent news, links to many arctic websites, and highlights climate, global impacts, land and marine ecosystems, and human consequences. Since its inception a year ago, it has averaged about 9000 hits an day on the web, and is a major information source as determined by Google search. The future direction focuses on understanding the causes for change. In spring 2005 we also presented a near real-time ecological and climatic surveillance website for the Bering Sea: www.beringclimate.noaa.gov. The site provides up-to-date information which ties northward shifts of fish, invertebrate and marine mammal populations to physical changes in the Arctic. This site is more technical than the arctic change detection site and provides support to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and other interested parties. The site anticipates multiple uses by providing access and analysis tools for a set of Bering Sea indicator time series.
UR: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/detect
DE: 0429 Climate dynamics (1620)
DE: 0439 Ecosystems, structure and dynamics (4815)
DE: 0845 Instructional tools
DE: 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513)
DE: 9315 Arctic region (0718, 4207)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005