The Impacts of Historical Observational Network Coverage on Our Understanding of Arctic Hydrology and Climate

The Arctic Landscape Conservation Cooperative commissioned the authors to construct a database of historical hydroclimate measurements and then use it to analyze the coverage of the current observational network. This database—called Imiq, the Inupiat Eskimo word for freshwater—was used in turn to study the impacts of network coverage on our state of knowledge about the climate in arctic Alaska. Some of these datasets date back to 1900 and long-term trends are calculated for temperature, precipitation, river discharge, and other variables. The magnitude, and in some cases the direction, of these trends is highly dependent on which stations were operating in the network at any given time. While the Imiq database provides new accessibility to several very long-term data records, the results of the analysis are a cautionary note on the use of disparate station data for trend detection.