Could AI Be Useful for Arctic Communities Facing Sea Ice Loss?

The forecasting tool IceNet promises to be a useful tool for evaluating sea ice loss in the Arctic. But ethical and logistic considerations have to be taken before scientific and Indigenous communities start working together.

Upscaling the resilience assessment through comparative analysis

Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to specific situation arenas, making comparision one of the unresolved challenges. Here we show how leveraging comparative analysis can provide insights on how Arctic communities (N = 40) can best deal with social and environmental change. We found that the capacity to self-organize, and nurturing diversity are sufficient conditions for Arctic communities whose livelihoods have been resilient, or for communities whose livelihoods have been transformed. Our study provides an alternative perspective on how to assess resilience by leveraging comparsion across cases. It also identify governance patways to support adaptations and transformations in the Arctic, a geography with some of the most dramatic social and natural challenges to come.

A multi-year analysis of Canadian Arctic historical weather data in support of solar and wind renewable energy deployment

This work explores the importance of renewable resource temporal distribution for solar and wind energy deployment in Arctic communities to meet building and ancillary loads. An analysis of ten years of historic weather data was performed for six locations in the Canadian Arctic to assess renewable resource variation. Simulations of similar capacity solar and wind generation systems were then coupled with the historic data to compare and contrast generation potential. This analysis highlighted the importance of considering hourly, daily, monthly, and year-to-year renewable generation when deploying solar and wind to the Arctic. As many northern communities in Canada have local electricity generation and distribution systems, and no connection to the continental grid, managing grid interactions effectively is crucial to the success of deployment, integration, and operation. The results for the solar energy analysis showed high consistency of production year-to-year. The results for the wind energy analysis showed that the annual outputs have significantly less variation than the year-to-year output of individual months for all the locations under study. For the high latitude locations studied, solar energy can still provide useful electricity generation output, but the more pronounced bias of the annual output to the summer months can leave several months with little or no output. The use of additional renewable sources is crucial in beginning to transition some electricity generating capacity within Arctic communities from being solely reliant on fossil fuels.