Study confirms topsy-turvy Nunavut weather in spring

“Inuit today have observed that their forecasts are not as accurate”

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

The weather observations of Inuit hunters encouraged scientists to study weather patterns– and their data confirms what hunters have been saying— that weather is getting less and less predictable. (PHOTO BY SHARI GEARHEARD)


The weather observations of Inuit hunters encouraged scientists to study weather patterns– and their data confirms what hunters have been saying— that weather is getting less and less predictable. (PHOTO BY SHARI GEARHEARD)

Inuit hunters in Baker Lake and Clyde River know their weather has become more unpredictable, particularly in the spring.

Now scientists have backed up these observations with data which confirms weather in the Arctic is behaving less predictably than in other parts of the world— likely due to the rise of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

The stability of weather has changed dramatically over the past 15 years and this can mean a warm day isn’t always followed by another warm day, says a new study, co-authored by Shari Gearheard, a researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who lives in Clyde River.

Inuit have noticed change during the spring when they now see “chaotic daily variability.”

“In a lot of places, the name of the season is named after a particular process [such as the hardening of snow into a crust],” said Gearheard in an April 7 news release on the study. “Inuit are not seeing that anymore, which was an indicator to them that something had changed.”

Gearheard and her co-researchers decided to look at the increased variability and unpredictability of weather, which Inuit hunters and elders had raised— an issue that had not been fully addressed yet by science.

As a result, they learned something new about Arctic weather, which they detail in their study published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change.

Including the observations and stories of the Inuit into climate research can provide valuable insights into asking the right scientific questions, and can help researchers find new ways of answering them, point out Gearheard and researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

“Traditional insights and understandings are a resource that can offer unexpected benefits if properly preserved and understood,” they say in their paper, Changes in weather persistence: Insight from Inuit knowledge.

By persistence, the researcher mean the tendency of a warmer-than-normal day to be followed by another warmer-than-normal day.

That’s the way it used to be in the Arctic, where traditionally, Inuit honed their skills in weather forecasting from a very young age, based on the observation of predictable weather patterns.

Inuit told researchers their weather-forecasting traditions have weakened since moving into communities in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Clyde River and Baker Lake Nunavut, where researchers focused their studies, Inuit point to the 1990s as the period when their skills first began to fail.

And that was due to the behaviour of the weather, not any loss of skill, which now makes it extremely difficult to predict the weather, they say.

“Adults and children alike would anijaaq, the routine of going outside each morning as soon as possible after waking to observe the weather. Children were sent out from a very young age and expected to report the weather. When they returned inside, children were quizzed repeatedly, and sent out repeatedly, until they were able to describe in detail wind direction, cloud patterns, sky condition, and so on. In this way Inuit children were taught the skills of weather observation and forecasting, skills they would continue to develop and refine through a lifetime of living off of the land.”

But “Inuit today have observed that their forecasts are not as accurate, or do not work at all, due to a mix of changing traditions and changing weather,” they note.

And the tradition of anijaaq is not practiced as it once was, though many elders and older hunters “still check the weather religiously each morning, if only from a window.”

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