| Summary: | High latitude regions of the world are very sensitive to the climate and this is reflected in the hydrologic response of watersheds. Because of increasing greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, it is predicted that climate dynamics will change for these arctic regions. We already know that there are seasonal extremes in climate (no solar radiation/24 hour solar radiation, -40/+20, snow/rain), we do not know if there are long-term trends or where these trends are going to take us (although the evidence is starting to amass). It is also known that phase change in many forms dominates the system: sublimation, evaporation, transpiration, freezing of water bodies and soils, thawing of soils and decay of ice on water bodies. It is also known that the winter season dominates the annual cycle by lasting eight to nine months. The overall goal of this project is to concentrate our research effort on an index watershed so that the International Research Community has quality, long-term data available to improve our understanding of hydrological processes, to detect and quantify climate induced change, to enable the development of new models to extrapolate hydrologically related processes in time and space and to verify remote sensing techniques. The watershed to be studied is the Kuparuk River on the North Slope of Alaska. This watershed is in an area of continuous permafrost, essentially treeless, the most accessible arctic watershed in Alaska, the most studied watershed in the Arctic presently, sufficiently large enough to allow atmospheric and surface processes to be coupled and data already exist for 11 years. The hydrologic cycle is the arteries, veins, and capillaries of the air-ice-land system of the Arctic; without an excellent understanding of the hydrologic cycle there is little hope for integrating biologic, chemical and physical processes across systems.
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