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ARCSS Data
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The Arctic System Science (ARCSS) Data Coordination Center at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), University of Colorado at Boulder, is the permanent data archive for all components of the ARCSS Program. Funded by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, our focus is to archive and provide access to ARCSS-funded data.

The goal of the ARCSS Program is two-fold:

1. to understand the physical, chemical, biological and social processes of the Arctic system that interact with the total Earth system and thus contribute to or are influenced by global change.

2. to advance the scientific bases for predicting environmental change on a decade-to-centuries time scale and for formulating policy options in response to the anticipated impacts of changing climate on humans and societal support systems.

The features that distinguish the ARCSS Program from other research efforts are epitomized by the words "Arctic" and "System." The program builds on a firm foundation of basic research in individual disciplines, aiming to achieve a genuine synthesis of knowledge that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. As an element of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, ARCSS includes paleoenvironmental studies to document changes in the past, and studies of the contemporary environment. The latter include process studies focused on understanding how elements of the Arctic system interact, and time series studies that support comparisons between observed variability and those simulated on the basis of current understanding. The ARCSS Program is especially concerned with issues of spatial and temporal scaling and aggregation that arise continually in efforts to link environmental variations on global and regional scales.

Priorities within ARCSS are established on the basis of the potential impact of research on a given topic, relevance to global change, and, particularly, the extent to which a project addresses major gaps in current knowledge. Modeling studies are central to the synthesis of ARCSS research.

The major ARCSS components include two programs to deal with modern interactions and processes between land, atmosphere, and ice (Land/Atmosphere/Ice Interactions or LAII), and between ocean, atmosphere, and ice (Ocean/Atmosphere/Ice Interactions or OAII). Two additional programs - the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2), and Paleoclimates from Arctic Lakes and Estuaries (PALE) - deal with the records of past climate change in the Arctic with emphasis on records of the last 2,000, 20,000, and 150,000 years. A third component is that of the Human Dimensions of the Arctic (HARC). HARC considers the scale and scope of human activity as a vital driver and a link among the terrestrial, marine, and climate subsystems as an integral part of the whole Arctic System. Lastly, Synthesis, Integration and Model Studies (SIMS) represent an important step toward a holistic understanding of the Arctic system, bridging the major ARCSS programs and other large Arctic research programs.

The concept of System Science, or integration, depends on the accessibility and exchange of data among the scientific community, and the ARCSS Data Coordination Center at NSIDC strives to facilitate that accessibility and cooperation.