Correlating tower observations and the twentieth century reanalysis at Utqiaġvik, Alaska

• Other Authors: Cast, Zaria (author), Hartten, Leslie (contributor), Rosenbloom, Nan (contributor), Carroll-Smith, Dereka (contributor)
• Format: Manuscript
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; Barrow; north slope; Alaska
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5065/pseb-4t38

The Arctic has accumulated many climate changes over a short period of time. This research focuses on Utqiaġvik, in the North Slope of Alaska, which is one of the few places in the Arctic where people have collected weather observations. We wanted to help give an understanding about the Arctic weather changes when it comes time for planning. With the need of history and past observations the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) gives a perspective view. It is a tool used to show in 3D form all types of weather data at different times and locations. The purpose of this research is to validate the 20CR, because there are few observations in the area when needed for comparisons from the past. The original plan was to use radiosonde data from 2002-2015, but in the end we decided to use 2 meter and 10 meter temperature from Barrow Tower with years 1981-2015. The focus was to find the correlation of the tower and 20CR data. The correlation of 2 meter temperatures was 0.9679. The correlation of 10m temperatures was 0.9670. Though the 2 correlations are similar, they are strongly positive, meaning that they are flowing together rather than away from each other. Year to year the correlations would vary a bit, but overall they were strongly positive. Also, vertical temperature gradients were an input in this study. The correlation for the gradient was 0.1435, positive but very weak. We separated the gradients due to wanting to know what the tower observed, more of an inversion or no inversion. Inversion showed a positive correlation and no inversion showed a negative correlation. The results show that 20CR temperatures at 2 meters and 10 meters correlate very well with the Tower. We hope for the future to expand on our work by taking into account radiosonde data that was not used for this part of our project.