ATLAS: Arctic Transitions in the Land-Atmosphere System

Summary

The Land-Atmosphere-Ice Interactions (LAII) Program is part of the Arctic System Science (ARCSS) Program of the National Science Foundation. LAII has overall goals of understanding how the fe edback processes within Arctic system affects global climate change, including changes in the hy drology, biochemical, plants animals, and ecosystems; as well as how these changes affect and ar e affected by human activities. The LAII Arctic Transitions in the Land-Atmosphere System (ATLAS ) program is designed as an interdisciplinary multi-year project with many investigators and var ied instrumentation to address the aforementioned objectives in Alaska and eventually in other p arts of the Arctic. Information on the ATLAS Project is located at: the LAII web page: http ://www.laii.uaf.edu/

Objectives:

The overall goal of the new LAII Arctic Transitions in the Land-Atmosphere System (ATLAS) program is to determine the geographical patterns and controls over climate-land surface exchange (mass and energy) and to develop reasonable scenarios of future change in the Arctic System. This objective is significantly broader than that of the previous LAII Flux Study in several respects: 1)We will extrapolate climate, permafrost, vegetation, and mass and energy fluxes from ?the plot scale to the circumpolar Arctic, 2)We will develop reasonable scenarios of future trajectories of these ecosystem properties over the next 10-200 years, 3)The guiding motivation of our research is to improve understanding of the coupled nature of the land and atmosphere in the Arctic System.