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Arctic Environmental and Engineering Data and Design Support System (Arctic-EDS)

Improving infrastructure resilience requires considering future climate conditions that may differ from the past. Historical observations are insufficient—the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world.

High-resolution downscaled climate models provide valuable insights into localized climate futures of temperature, precipitation, and other environmental conditions such as permafrost, but their output introduces uncertainties to engineering applications. A systematic approach is needed to integrate future climate trends into engineering, including selecting appropriate models, understanding uncertainties, and addressing variable spatial and temporal scales.

The Arctic Environmental and Engineering Data and Design Support System (Arctic-EDS) streamlines the process of using downscaled climate models for engineering. The Arctic-EDS simplifies and centralizes the process of finding, selecting, extracting, and formatting downscaled climate model output: it pre-selects relevant models, simplifies data extraction, and provides reports with future projections of climate variables and indices. Data is available for download in a tabular format, with links to source datasets and academic references. Example computational notebooks demonstrate how to apply the data to engineering applications.

All downscaled climate model outputs are vulnerable to various sources of uncertainty, including:

Natural climate variability
Limited historical climate station data from which to interpolate gridded baseline datasets and validate modeled gridded data
Model assumptions and parameterizations
Uncertainty regarding future societal and economic behaviors
Spatial and temporal resolutions of downscaled climate data

The Arctic-EDS regulates these uncertainties by:

Presenting gridded data from multiple climate models and emissions scenarios
Stating spatial and temporal scales of each dataset
Presenting bias-corrected data

No climate model or data processing technique can entirely eliminate uncertainty, but the Arctic-EDS unlocks data that shows how future climate conditions might differ from the past. Each engineering application may require additional steps to interpret results and apply them to a specific design.

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With JavaScript enabled, this site allows you to:

Search by community or latitude and longitude pair for relavant data including temperature, precipitation, and more.
Online maps showing the spatial distribution of climate variables.

If you need help accessing this content, please email uaf-snap-data-tools@alaska.edu.

University of Alaska Fairbanks | Scenarios Network for Alaska + Arctic Planning

Arctic-EDS
Arctic Environmental and Engineering Data and Design Support System

Statewide Climate Overview Maps

Use these maps to see Alaska-wide overview of some climate-related environmental variables. These maps aren’t interactive.
To see all available data for a point, return to the home page and select a community or point at the bottom of the page.
⇩ Scroll down to see maps of precipitation, permafrost, temperature, and temperature indices such as freezing degree days.