Collaborative Research: Working with Inuit Elders and Youth to Identify, Document, Quantify, and Share Human-Relevant Environmental Variables (HREVs) in Clyde River, Nunavut

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Paragraph 1 This award supports scientific research by anthropologists, geographers, and atmospheric scientists to understand the relationship between how weather is normally measured and the factors that Arctic Indigenous peoples need to travel and work out of doors. In the same way that wind-chill, a combination of temperature and wind speed has become a commonly used composite of weather information used by many Americans, for Inuit visibility and sea-state are critical factors in whether to travel or stay put. For example, visibility is a product of cloud cover, wind, snow conditions, terrain, and more. The research team will seek to quantify factors and test them through camps for Elders and youth. In turn, the Elders and youth will train scientists about the nuanced nature of safely and successfully traveling and working in the Arctic. If successful, the team plans to share the factors with forecast agencies and others to increase the production of actionable knowledge. Paragraph 2 This research will investigate human-relevant environmental variables in close collaboration with an Inuit community in the Eastern Arctic to co-produce knowledge on Arctic weather in order to inform decisions that enable safe, productive travel on land, open sea, and sea-ice required for acquiring food and other cultural purposes. In the research team's work with the community of Clyde River, Nunavut, they have found that synthetic environmental variables (e.g., visibility, blowing snow, wave height) are more important than individual meteorological variables (e.g., air temperature, wind speed). In addition, the work will be expanded and strengthened by working with additional communities in the US and Greenland. In short, Inuit synthesize complex variables representing the natural environment to inform decisions that facilitate their life-way in this environment. The research will be carried out in a setting familiar to Inuit and consistent with Inuit social values and interactions, organized as a series of Elder-youth science camps between Alaska Native and Eastern Arctic Inuit. This approach overlaps with strong community interests in fostering interactions and knowledge transfer among Elders and youth, as well as collaborating with visiting scientists. As Elders consider what to do, they will also be teaching the youth, making explicit many thoughts and considerations that otherwise typically remain implicit. The youth, in turn, will help document this knowledge transfer by keeping journals during the camps about their activities and what they are learning and doing. Participant observation by the research team will give insight into this process, so they can understand how awareness of weather and related factors emerge, and will allow them to create mathematical descriptions of those factors. In addition to the usual project publications and presentations for academic audiences, the scientists will add to their existing network of local weather stations and the associated Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit language) and English public website that reports near-real-time weather dataThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.