Highlights
(2/26/07) RUHBC begins
An international research team began a three–week field campaign at the Department of Energy's ARM site in Barrow to provide the first simultaneous high–resolution dataset of Arctic clear sky and cirrus cloud properties in elusive portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. More arrow

Artic Climate Change Projections for the 21st Century
Recent model simulations project a decline of sea ice extent in the range of 1.4-3.9% per decade and 4.8-22.2% per decade in the boreal winter and summer, respectively, corresponding to the lower-to-higher anthropogenic forcings. More arrow

US IPY Information
For National information see http://www.us-ipy.gov
DOE International Polar Year Activities
arctic viewThe DOE IPY activies are supported by the DOE Office of Science's Climate Change Research Division. Research is focused on understanding the basic chemical, physical, and biological processes of the Earth's atmosphere, land, and oceans and how these processes may be affected by energy production and use, primarily the emission of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion. The IPY projects fall into two categories: modeling and field studies.
Field Studies:
Field studies will be conducted at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility (ACRF) located in the North Slope of Alaska. This DOE user facility delivers continuous data for arctic research and will host two IPY experiments: Radiative Heating in Underexplored Bands Campaign (RHUBC) and the Indirect and Semidirect Aerosol Campaign. Other IPY proposals are under review and may be supported. More arrow
Modeling:
The mission of the DOE Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP) is to advance climate change science and improve climate change projections using state-of-the-science coupled climate models, on time scales of decades to centuries and space scales of regional to global.

The CCPP sponsors the Climate, Ocean and Sea Ice Modeling Project (COSIM) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The COSIM project provides the ongoing development and distribution of (1) the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) ocean general circulation model, which is the ocean component of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM); and (2) the LANL Sea Ice Model (CICE), which is one option for the sea ice component of the CCSM. In addition to coupled climate simulations, COSIM researchers apply POP, CICE and other ocean models to a variety of ocean and sea ice problems, including eddy-resolving ocean simulations, studies of the thermohaline circulation, and polar ice feedbacks. 

The end-product of the CCPP is the simulation and prediction of contemporary climate and possible future climates using the state-of-science coupled climate models, e.g., the CCSM. These multi-century simulations are coordinated through the CCSM Climate Change Working Group. Results from these simulations are accessible to interested researchers throughout the world and serve as critical input to major national and international assessments of potential future climatic changes in the polar regions. See http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ccp/ for details.