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.