Using Traditional Inuit Knowledge and Scientific Methods to Characterize Historical Climate Change Impacts to Sea Ice in Resolute Bay, Nunavut ...

• Main Author: Forsythe, Alexandra
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2023
• Subjects: Traditional Inuit Knowledge; Sea Ice; Climate Impacts; Socio-economic Impacts; Arctic; Historical trends; Nunavut; Resolute Bay; Climate change; inuit; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-29869; http://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/45665

One of the most visible impacts of climate change in Arctic environments is declining sea ice. Due to an absence of spatially coarse quantitative data, there is a lack of understanding on declining sea ice on a community scale. This study seeks to document historical trends in air temperature, sea ice thickness (SIT), break-up dates (BUDs) and freeze-up dates (FUDs), correlate sea ice behaviour to air temperatures, and document the socio-economic impacts of sea ice change in Resolute Bay Nunavut, using traditional Inuit knowledge (TIK) and scientific methods. During the scientific portion of this study linear regression, statistical significance, anomaly analysis, and change point detection were used on time series of sea ice concentration (SIC), SIT, and air temperature. Two SIC datasets were accessed to characterize BUDs and FUDs, Canadian Ice Services archived sea ice charts from 1982-2022 and Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S) gridded satellite derived SIC from 1979-2015. The BUD was defined when ...