IPY: Collaborative Research on Carbon, Water, and Energy Balance of the Arctic Landscape at Flagship Observatories and in a PanArctic Network

Funds are provided to establish two observatories, in the U.S. and Russia, and form a PanArctic network of observatories where coordinated measures of landscape-level carbon, water, and energy balance are carried out and results made available in a unified database. The observatories will be established at two existing sites of research on landscape-level carbon, water, and energy balance - Toolik Lake (Alaska) and Cherskii (Siberia) - and the network of observatories across the Arctic where similar long-term observations of carbon, water and energy variables are made or proposed as part of IPY will include Toolik, Cherskii, Abisko (Sweden, the main site of the ABACUS project), Zackenberg (Greenland), and several sites in Arctic Canada.

Funds are specifically provided for instruments and personnel at Toolik and Cherskii, as well as international workshops and visits among the sites to ensure that data and instrumentation are easily comparable. Rather than studying one process at a time, this effort focuses on simultaneous measurements of carbon, water, and energy fluxes of the Arctic terrestrial landscape at hourly, daily, seasonal, and multiyear time scales. These are major regulatory drivers of the Arctic System, forming key linkages and feedbacks between the land surface, the atmosphere, and the oceans.

The data collected will become a legacy by using measurement and data archiving approaches that are comparable among observatories. The data management protocols and archives used for nearly 20 years by the NSF Arctic Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project (based at Toolik Lake) will be used; data will be archived in the Arctic LTER database and, through links to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), will be generally available to the community.