Mother Earth Journal

Courtesy NOAA

For the last 15 years the Inuit have reported that Arctic weather has been less stable and more unpredictable. Now, scientists are listening.

As they have for generations, Inuit hunters across the Canadian Arctic and beyond begin their day judging the weather with precise, descriptive language, careful observation and continual refining and practice. Their decisions can spell the difference between life and death.

Their traditional atmospheric knowledge is helping to answer questions on changes in weather patterns, according to a new study accepted for publication in the journal Global Environmental Change.

The study integrates Inuit weather interpretations based on wind direction and speed, cloud formations, animal behaviors, the stars, sun, and moon, with scientific evidence obtained from ice cores, weather satellites, and computer models.

“The character of the weather is changing, a critical problem for the Inuit,” said lead author Elizabeth Weatherhead, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado. “They were talking about something very specific that was disrupting their lifestyle.”

To reconcile differences between what Inuit were saying about their weather and what scientists were recording, Weatherhead looked at the data collected by her co-author and University of Colorado colleague anthropologist Shari Gearheard. Gearheard lived with the Inuit in Canada, and paid close attention to their descriptions of weather irregularities and time scales.

Weatherhead examined the weather in two Nunavut communities for short-term, day-to-day variability during June’s spring weather, the month the Inuit said had the greatest unpredictability.

“I realized the indigenous people were right, the weather is getting more unpredictable in their area,” Weatherhead said.

She then compared Arctic weather with how weather is changing around the world. “While the Arctic is getting more unpredictable, the rest of the world is getting persistent weather.”

Persistence is the tendency of weather to remain stable for days at a time. “We used to get cold spells that would last three to four days, now they last for weeks non-stop,” explains Weatherhead.

“Our hunters have been telling us for decades that weather and ice conditions are changing, though when we began noticing it we didn’t call it climate change,” said Patricia Cochran, executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. A goal of their commission is to facilitate the inclusion of local and traditional knowledge into research and science.

Cochran said their communities have been on the receiving end of these unfortunate circumstances. “Now we have community members who go out hunting, are caught by rapidly occurring freak storms or who fall through thinning ice, and they never return.

“Our ancestors taught us that the Arctic environment is not constant, and that some years are harder than others. But they taught us that hard years are followed by times of greater abundance and celebration. As we have found with other aspects of our culture’s ancestral wisdom, modern changes, not of our doing, make us wonder when the good years will return.”

Their traditional ecological knowledge is guiding their adaptation to these rapidly changing conditions. “For example, many of our communities are going back to using dog teams instead of snow machines because the dogs will warn you,” said Cochran. “We’re looking to find adaptive strategies on our own.”

Weatherhead said the study is important because it takes seriously people who are in touch with the earth. “Indigenous knowledge can help us understand what changes are taking place, and help identify which critical issues are most important,” she said. “They can they can help us decide what our best path forward is.”

In the Arctic, average temperatures have risen almost twice as fast as in the rest of the world and climate disruptions are felt particularly intensely. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects continuing greenhouse gas emissions will cause significant changes in climatic conditions, changes in ocean currents, sea levels and in the amount and distribution of precipitation. These changes will have significant impacts on human communities, and their ecosystems.

By Terri Hansen for Indian Country Today.