Personnel with the National Park Service’s (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring Program have been busy planning new locations where long-term climate stations will be deployed in the Western Arctic Park Lands. The goal of this network is to establish baseline weather measurements such as air temperature, wind speed, and soil temperature so that with time, long-term changes may be observed. Potential sites in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve are shown below. Because the mission of the NPS is to maintain pristine parklands, these stations are being designed to have a small footprint.  Other weather stations exist on the Seward Peninsula, but many of these sites are located at lower elevations along the coast. The new sites proposed by NPS will fill a current gap in understanding about climate fluctuations in a variety of elevations and landscape types. An Environmental Assessment (EA) was initiated this fall to evaluate the environmental impacts of operating weather stations within the Preserve. Installations are scheduled for 2010, pending the outcome of the EA. For more information see the Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network webpage: http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/units/arcn/ 

Figure: National Park Service staff