Mapping 21st century climate change in Alaska
UAF partnership with Google puts information in Alaskans’ hands
Published Friday, November 7, 2008
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FAIRBANKS — It’s not a crystal ball, but the Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning is offering a glimpse into the state’s future.
SNAP is a network of research organizations and government agencies devoted to forecasting the future climate of Alaska and providing that information to government officials and other policy planners.
Climate maps and predictions are now available through the organization and can be viewed with Google Earth, making them widely accessible to the general public. Some of the maps have animation to show predicted climate change across time.
The program is part of the the University of Alaska Geography Program’s partnership with Google. In September, Google employees visited Barrow, Nome and Kotzebue to teach rural teachers how to apply Google Earth and other programs into their lessons.
Now, people curious about how climate change will affect Alaska in the future can look up the average summer or winter temperatures of the state in 2030 or how much precipitation is expected to fall in 2099 with data from models used by professional forecasters.
The organization hopes to keep adding maps and plans to ultimately have more than 3,000, SNAP Director Scott Rupp said.
“The mission of SNAP is to make the first attempts to look at what the future of Alaska will be,” Rupp said.
One of the priorities for the organization is to provide baseline information to the governor’s climate change subcabinet and other advisory groups to help plan and make better informed decisions and policies to deal with circumstances such as rising sea levels and decreased polar ice.
Mike Sfraga, director of the University of Alaska geography program, announced during a teleconference Wednesday that Google has signed a partnership with the university to develop more educational programs. Sfraga said he believed UA was the only university system that has a partnership of this type with Google.
“They’re with us for the long term,” he said.
The union of Rupp’s organization and the geography department is a great match because it helps publicize the work done by researchers, Sfraga said.
Some of the lesson plans and exercises used during the Google trip were created using data collected by Rupp and his researchers. Rupp said the organization is experiencing some growing pains as it becomes more popular and more requests are made. Even with nine full-time postdoctoral staff and other technical employees, it takes a lot of work to collect data and translate it into a form usable by the general public.
Contact staff writer Christi Hang at 459-7590.
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While a good education tool the "predicted climate change" model to date has been wrong. The actual temperature has proven to be far different than the predictions. The temperature is cooler than predicted worldwide. This is not in line with the Global Warming Crowd so is being hushed up. They also have yet to offer any verifiable proof that manmade carbon dioxde has any effect on climate.
May be we should all refer to the "now famous Drake Equation"...I think Big Al used it for the basis of all his garbage predictions.
Thank You very much..
I went to the UAF-SNAP website linked in the article and found it to be very informative. I downloaded the KML-files, it's always important to keep a complete reference library.
Maybe someday soon we'll be able to cover the state with a polypipe-gasline network that is also a conduit for fiberoptic..
this will enable broadband interconnectivity via WiFi-WiMAX networks to every square mile.. all types of data-sets in real-time will become accessible to UAF, from the tops of mountains to the bottom of the Aleutian Trench 100miles south of Amchitka.
It is nice to see UAF partnering up with a major force such as Google to provide better information tools to the public. I hope they continue with this path.
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