WELCOME TO THE INTERNATIONAL ARCTIC RESEARCH CENTER (IARC)

Working with arctic research scientists throughout the world to improve our understanding of the Arctic System

IARC was established to promote international cooperation in an effort to integrate and synthesize arctic climate change research. It is a place where scientists from around the world work together to study arctic climate change, where we explore the causes of arctic climate change and try to reduce uncertainty in our predictions of the future arctic environment and the impacts upon northern societies.  The magnitude of the challenges we face in attempting to characterize and quantify our changing climate, the drivers, the thresholds, and the feedbacks are too great for any single institution, or even nation, to resolve.  IARC strives to facilitate collaboration and cooperation among US and international research scientists and engineers to resolve problems for the benefit of our global society.

IARC is focused upon creating and maintaining international collaborations.  We have strong collaborative relationships with research institutions in Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway, Russia, and Sweden.  These partnerships have helped advance our nation’s ability to understand the processes associated with a changing climate and will improve our adaptive capacity.  IARC is helping to prepare an international workforce to address these challenges.   We host one or two summer schools annually for advanced graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to better train researchers in the complex interconnections among the many disciplines that play a role in climate dynamics.  We also facilitate professional development workshops for pre-college teachers to help them engage their students in Earth-system-science research.

Additionally, we convene six to eight international workshops annually to synthesize the state of the art knowledge that is distributed across the globe to yield integrated assessments of contemporary scientific issues.

In order to pursue this unique role of comprehensive integration, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and others are currently funding IARC researchers.

This web page provides details of all the IARC projects, including the educational outreach projects that also have international dimensions. It is our hope that these efforts to integrate scientific results will grow throughout the arctic scientific community and beyond.

I welcome your comments and suggestions and hope you will join our efforts to develop a more complete understanding of the Arctic.

Larry Hinzman, Director