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ERDC/CRREL TR-02-10
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Presented here is a summary of five years of nearly continuous hourly sur-
face meteorological measurements at five locations in the Kuparuk Basin on the
Arctic Slope of Alaska, extending from near the coast to the foothills of the
Brooks Range and spanning an environment from the coastal plain near sea level
to the uplands region with elevations over 900 m. The data were analyzed and
discussed largely in the context of running and seasonal averages and in the con-
text of four quarter-year seasons. As well as considering temperature trends, this
study developed a wind climatology for the five stations, with a thresholding
scheme based on the potential of windiness to impact on the snow cover, the
dominant ground cover for over eight months of the year.
A picture emerges of the Arctic Slope as a region dominated by subfreezing
temperatures for most of the annual cycle; the brief warm and snow-free season
in June, July, and August is even shorter than that of Arctic Alaska south of the
Brooks Range. The five sites in the 200-km-long transect, while exhibiting some
degree of variation from what might considered an "Arctic-Slope-wide" clima-
tology, still showed a good deal of similarity in both seasonal variation and
meteorological forcing on a time scale of a few days.
Overall, the Arctic Slope is typified by almost constant light to moderate
winds. Contrary to the common image of the Arctic Slope as a vast windswept
region dominated by blizzard conditions, strong winds--those capable of remo-
bilizing snow that has already been consolidated into the snow cover--are actu-
ally rather infrequent. The more coastal locations tend to experience NE and SW
winds. Farther inland the wind direction becomes more variable. The southern-
most site, IMN (Imnaviat Creek), typically has some southerly component to the
wind in all seasons, in large measure because of its proximity to the Brooks
Range.
Southerly winds at IMN are favored by a regional terrain configuration that
can induce drainage flows as well as gap and wave-enhanced circulations. IMN
tends to have episodic southerly strong wind events in Deep Cold (DC) and is
also frequently decoupled at this time from the thermal regime of the lower sites.
The overall variability of wind conditions during the cold season, coupled with
the thermal influence of open water along the coast in October and November,
suggests that caution should be used in extrapolating the conditions found along
the coast (where the best long-term climate records exist) to the inland and
upland locations of the Arctic Slope.
A notable feature of the annual temperature curve is a pronounced "bump" or
short-term warming trend in the otherwise steady decline of temperatures across
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