Pan-Arctic System Modelling (PASM) for detection and early warning of climate change impacts

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The most recent IPCC working group report declared that observed climate changes are "unprecedented" and "intensifying" and the United Nations declared that tackling the scientific understanding of climate change as "one of the most pressing issues of our time". In the Canadian context, climate change impacts in the Arctic are explicitly linked with economic prosperity, resource security, and National sovereignty, including transportation routes and international trade via northern shipping routes and ice roads. Runoff generation and cumulative contributions of freshwater discharge into the Arctic basin are rapidly changing under warming high-latitude climates, but the impacts of these dynamic shifts in both the timing and volume of freshwater are relatively unknown. It is well established that increasing freshwater discharge to the Arctic basin is impacting the amount and seasonality of sea ice, which in turn influences thermohaline circulation. Examining the influence changing freshwater inputs have on the Arctic basin is crucial to the global understanding of climate change and Arctic ecosystems. Leveraging my expertise in continental scale, high latitude hydrologic modelling, this research proposes to develop critical linkages between climate, hydrologic and human-induced landscape changes that impact pan-Arctic discharge. By developing an integrated pan-arctic System Modelling (PASM) platform, dynamic climate-driven hydrologic scenarios will be integrated with the NEMO ocean model, providing continuous (in time and space) runoff, physical tracers of freshwater (i.e., temperature, isotope tracers), and river ice and velocity. Such a platform is crucial to the understanding of the cumulative effects of climate change on Arctic systems, and the subsequent impacts on ocean thermohaline circulation (i.e., the North Atlantic deep-water formation) affecting global climate. The Intergovernmetal Panel on Climate Change and Arctic council both recognize the Grand Challenge of an Arctic region at risk under a rapidly warming climate, destabilizing soils underpinning infrastructure and impacting transportation and access to the North.