27 March 2025 | 08:30 - 10:00 (MDT)
Open Session - HYBRID
Room: UMC Third Floor - 384
Organisers: Laura Landrum (NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA); Andy Newman (NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA); Kaare Erickson (Ikaagun Engagement, USA)
Session Description:
As the Arctic continues to experience rapid climate change, Arctic communities are navigating these climatic changes along with social, economical, and geopolitical changes and with knowledge systems different from the western scientists who produce and run climate models.
Climate model simulations represent different possible earth system states given the specified external forcings, and information from these models can help tell us about possible future climates. Humans, however, do not tend to experience “climate change” on the large geographic and temporal scales represented in climate models so much as through conditions that are considered extreme on human scales. Some extreme conditions may coincide with geophysical statistical extremes such as typhoons, heat waves, or flooding. Other extreme conditions, however, may be due to longer-term yet extreme system-wide changes (e.g. diminishing spring sea ice in the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, Chukchi Sea areas along with extreme changes in access to traditional foods), or extreme events compounded by longer-term dramatic changes (e.g. strong storms coinciding with permafrost thaw and sea ice decrease and thus leading to extreme coastal erosion).
This session aims to explore methods to better integrate information from earth system models with information from traditional ecological knowledge to better inform adaptive measures in the rapidly changing Arctic environment. This encompasses topics on downscaling of simulated environmental conditions for local applications, perspectives on informing model developments with Indigenous knowledge, and information on the process of working together across different knowledge systems.