Improving Public Understanding of Arctic Climate Variations

Complex environmental changes are occurring in the Arctic, and NOAA's Arctic Theme Page is a comprehensive source of Arctic information for a wide audience, including scientists, students, teachers, decision makers and the general public. Features include educational material, photographs (including the North Pole Web Cam), Maps, links to forecasts, realtime and retrospective data, and expert essays on key Arctic issues, ranging from changes in Sea Level, Ice Extent, Climate indices to changes in Polar bear and Arctic wolf populations. Clear indications of the success of the website include recognition by USA Today, Science magazine, Scientific American, Yahoo, etc. (http://www.arctic.noaa.gov).

Working jointly with NSF and the University of Washington's Polar Science Center as part of the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) program, NOAA has developed a website for access to pan-Arctic time series spanning diverse data types including climate indices, atmospheric, oceanic, sea ice, terrestrial, biological and fisheries. Modest analysis functions and more detailed analysis results are provided. (http://www.unaami.noaa.gov/).

Recent developments are focused on providing a direct and comprehensive view of previous and ongoing changes in the Arctic, across multiple scientific disciplines and analyses, for a broad climate community. For example, composite metrics are developed using principal component analysis based on 86 multivariate pan-Arctic time series based on seven data types. Two of these metrics can be interpreted as a regime change/trend component and an interdecadal component. Changes can also be visually observed through tracking of 28 biophysical indicators.