CIFAR Provides Alaskan Input to Climate Change Synthesis Report

The leadership of the Climate Change Science Program, in coordination with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality, has called for an integrative report, or Unified Synthesis Product that provides a coherent analysis of the current understanding of climate change in the United States. Dr. John Walsh, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR), has been appointed to the Synthesis Product Development Committee, established by NOAA and tasked with producing the report by the end of 2008. The committee held its first meeting in Chicago on March 31-April 1, 2008.

Alaska is one of eight regions of the U.S. for which key climate change impacts will be presented. The impacts will span sectors that include water resources, energy production and use, transportation, human welfare and human health, natural environment and biodiversity, agriculture and land use.

Background: Projects supported by CIFAR are providing the basis for the depictions of recent climate trends in Alaska and projections of 21st-century changes shown by global climate models. In particular, high-resolution maps of temperature and precipitation changes have been obtained by downscaling the global climate models that show the best performance in simulations of Alaskan climate over the latter half of the 20th Century.

Significance: The goal of this report is to synthesize key scientific findings regarding recent and 21st Century climate change and its impacts in the United States based on various mitigation options. The synthesis will be drawn from the enormous body of existing decision-making information, making those results easily accessible to policy- and decision-makers in a single, plain-English document that can inform public and private decision making at all levels. This report will be the first such national-level report since the 2001 National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change.