The Environmental Working Group
Arctic Atlases on CD-ROM

Although it hosts few air, ocean and land routes and is virtually ice-locked from October to June, the Arctic encompasses a strategic position between North America and Russia. The Arctic Ocean provides the shortest marine link between the extremes of eastern and western Russia, and the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route are important seasonal waterways. These factors, with natural resources that include fish, seals, whales, and oil and gas fields, have influenced exploration and intelligence-gathering in the Arctic by world superpowers from the 11th century.

However, as the Arctic's perennially-drifting polar ice pack, forbidding conditions, and long night have progressively yielded to study, scientists eager to share information have promoted collaboration between nations. Now, thanks to U.S. and Russian cooperation, an Environmental Working Group (EWG) is finding ways to combine each country's scientific strengths.

These Atlases on CD-ROM contain historical and new information, including some previously classified data. The EWG Arctic Atlases include a variety of observations painstakingly recorded over the past century in one of the most hostile climates on the planet. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) invites you to explore the contents of each Atlas to find Russian and Western perspectives on the Arctic climate system, including a host of atmospheric, oceanographic, and cryospheric data, maps, histories, and climate and weather facts.

EWG Products at NSIDC

Arctic Climatology Project - EWG Arctic Meteorology and Climate Atlas: Find out about life on Russian North Pole drifting stations and learn about weather hazards in the Russian Arctic from documents translated from the Russian. Besides summarizing the history of arctic exploration from both Russian and U.S. vantage points, the Atlas includes an article about native Inuit climate knowledge. Maps of air temperature, sea level pressure, precipitation, cloud cover, snow and solar radiation from drifting and coastal stations are featured. A photo gallery from early North Pole stations, an arctic weather primer, and an English-Russian glossary of meteorological terms round out this volume and make it an ideal educational tool. (See the NOAA and University of Colorado press releases announcing the new CD-ROM. See also the accompanying Arctic Climatology and Meteorology Primer.)

Environmental Working Group Joint U.S.-Russian Atlas of the Arctic Ocean: When this atlas was released it more than doubled the scientific holdings of oceanographic data available to U.S. scientists. It contains hydrographic fields for decadal periods (1950s,1960s, 1970s, 1980s) that were developed using more than one million individual observations collected from Russian drifting stations, ice breakers, and airborne expeditions. U.S. buoy observations were specifically declassified by the U.S. Navy for this project. The story of this atlas's development is detailed in the National Geographic article "An Arctic Breakthrough," Feb. 1997.

Environmental Working Group Joint U.S.-Russian Arctic Sea Ice Atlas: This atlas features climatologies of sea ice chart data from Russian and U.S. ice centers. It is based on individual observations collected over the period 1950 through 1994 from U.S. Russian satellite data, ice stations, icebreakers, and airborne ice surveys. Additionally, U.S. submarines operating in the Arctic over the period from 1977 through 1993 collected data used for a previously classified ice climatology. (See the NOAA press release announcing the new CD-ROM.)

The Environmental Working Group Joint U.S.- Russian Atlas of the Arctic Ocean was developed by specialists from the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan with Russian and U.S. partners. The Atlas consists of separate CD-ROM volumes for winter and summer. More than 1.3 million individual temperature and salinity observations collected from Russian and western drifting stations, ice breakers, and airborne expeditions were used to develop the products contained in the winter atlas. The primary products on the atlas are gridded mean fields for decadal periods (1950s,1960s, 1970s, 1980s) of temperature, salinity, density and dynamic height, Atlantic water layer depth, and temperature and salinity profiles and transects. Note that the original individual observations are not provided on the CD-ROM.