Currently, the only long-term direct measurements we have of air temperature change in the US arctic come from a single station – Barrow, located on the coast. So for all this talk of arctic climate change, the US has only one direct measurement representing an area the size of the California, and this comes from a coastal station which is no more representative of California than is one in San Francisco. Other stations had been discontinued 20 years ago due to funding, and new ones are not necessarily as robust as they should be for trend monitoring. I’m involved with several projects to install new long-term sites, but long-term funding remains the central problem. That is, even though I can get funding to install new sites today, there are no guarantees that funding will exist tomorrow to maintain them. These sites are about as remote as it gets and the equipment costs are almost negligible compared to the logistical costs.

One idea I’ve been considering is to perhaps seek private funding, as this may be more reliable in the long-term than government funding. There’s lots of rich people out there looking for ‘good’ ways to spend their money, right? Do you think an ‘adopt an arctic weather station’ program would succeed? With good weather, we’re talking about maybe $50k to install a first-class station, and about half that to maintain it reliably each year (with some additional ground time for snow pack measurements, etc); we need about 20 stations total to do a pretty good job. Could we start an endowment where the interest money would fund station maintenance in perpetuity? Maybe there are other ideas along these lines? Anyway, just curious.

-- MattNolan