The Sitka Sound Science Center and several regional and national partners have received a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop natural hazard monitoring and warning systems in tribal communities throughout Southeast.
Project KUTÍ — the Tlingit word for weather — builds on the center’s community process used in Sitka to build a landslide warning system.
Sitka will serve as a hub for the project, but the goal is to “develop a co-produced regional system for warning residents of events that might lead to flooding, avalanches and landslides,” according to a news release from the science center.
The project team includes the communities and tribal representatives from Sitka, Yakutat, Haines, Skagway, Hoonah, Craig and Kasaan; along with the Central Council Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, a couple of universities, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Sitka Tribe of Alaska, U.S. Forest Service, National Weather Service, Alaska Division of Geology and Geophysical Services, and the U.S. Geologic Survey.
“We’ll be sending scientists to the communities to work with people,” said Ron Heintz, research director at the Sitka Sound Science Center. “You hear about problems associated with climate change, and here’s an opportunity where we can do something in response to climate change.”
The science center and scientists will work to develop hazard monitoring and warning systems in the participating communities based on what each community wants, he said. Some want a landslide warning system similar to Sitka’s, and others may be interested in flood and avalanche programs, Heintz said.
The project is “based on distributed sensors and predictive models of the impacts of extreme weather events in Southeast Alaska,” the announcement said. “Already one of the rainiest regions on the planet, the 30 rural communities of Southeast Alaska, spanning 18,000 miles of coastline, are experiencing extreme weather events with more frequency, as a result of climate change. These weather events put the safety of people and the stability of infrastructure at risk.”
Lisa Busch, the science center director, described the program as “researchers working to help answer questions that communities want the answers to. … That’s the cool part of it.” One of the goals is to show how “traditional knowledge can work together with geoscience to help us understand the world better.”
The news release noted the impact of climate change not only on natural disaster risk but on subsistence as well, which Busch said highlights the potential of the project.
“Traditionally, Indigenous people planned subsistence food gathering according to astute observations of the weather. But changes in climate are interfering with traditional gathering,” the news release said.
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