Alaska is home to a wealth of natural resources that fuel its economy. The North Slope contains some of the largest oil and gas fields in the country, the Southeast and Southcentral coasts harbor high quality timber, and the state’s waters yield billions of dollars per year in fisheries harvests. Alaska also holds vast, largely untapped coal reserves and is a major producer of zinc, gold, and other valuable minerals.  

In addition to its bountiful natural resources, Alaska's geographically strategic position makes it a critical player in homeland defense, serving as a first line of missile defense and base for troops capable of rapid deployment to any theater in the Northern Hemisphere.  

Recent Executive and Department of the Interior Secretarial Orders outline actions for unleashing Alaska’s resource potential (EO14153, SO3422) and American energy (EO14096) to enhance the nation’s economic and national security for generations to come. However, Alaska is experiencing rapid environmental changes like thawing permafrost and more frequent and severe wildfires that have significant implications for access and development of natural resources and for military infrastructure and operations.  

Much of the Arctic’s infrastructure is built on frozen ground known as “permafrost.” But as the Arctic experiences rapidly warming temperatures, permafrost is thawing. During this process, the soil weakens and becomes less capable of supporting structures, threatening the integrity of roads, buildings, bridges, and runways.  

Globally, approximately 70% of Arctic infrastructure exists in areas with a high potential for permafrost thaw and infrastructure losses are estimated to cost Alaska \$37 to \$51 billion by mid- to late-century. In addition to these economic costs, changes to permafrost have implications for energy development and national security. Permafrost thaw regularly damages pipelines and power grids. It has significantly undermined infrastructure on Arctic military bases and can make access to training grounds less predictable.

The Alaska CASC is identifying where the ground will remain frozen and where and when it will thaw. This information is critical for appropriately engineering and siting roads, pipelines, and facilities for energy development and for mitigating potential damage to the military infrastructure that underpins the U.S.’s northern defense capabilities. 

Wildfires can burn millions of acres in Alaska in a given year, with most fires occurring in the interior boreal forest. Fires pose a serious threat to infrastructure, including energy-related facilities like the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which runs through fire-prone regions. They also disrupt the electrical grid. Because Alaska’s energy sector relies on a patchwork of isolated “microgrids,” damaged powerlines can lead to prolonged blackouts, as communities have no way to redirect electricity from neighboring areas. Wildfires can damage military facilities, force the cancellation of training exercises, and restrict access to training areas.

Additionally, smoke from wildfires can cause many problems. Smoke can hinder aviation, causing significant challenges in a state where 82% of communities are inaccessible by road, and air travel is essential for servicing communities, accessing natural resources, and suppressing fires from the air. Smoke also impacts the ability of the military to conduct training and operations.

Wildfires in Alaska are becoming more intense and destructive, while the fire season is getting longer. Where fires burn is also changing. While the majority of fires in Alaska occur in the boreal forest, fire activity has increased in the treeless tundra of northern and western Alaska over the past two decades. Warmer springs, longer summers, more frequent lightning strikes, and changes in vegetation have contributed to these changes in fire.

The Alaska CASC’s efforts to forecast future wildfires and predict fire behavior will improve the ability of industries, the military, natural resource managers, and communities to anticipate and prepare for these events.  

In southern Alaska, avalanches can damage roads, railways, buildings, and power transmission lines. In Juneau, Alaska Electrical Lights & Power Co. has invested in multi-million-dollar avalanche diversion structures that protect transmission towers, following damage from avalanches in 2008 and 2009. Avalanches can also block transportation corridors, impeding access to natural resources and critical public services.

Despite their profound societal and environmental impacts, comprehensive avalanche hazard information is severely limited due to a lack of meteorological and snowpack observations, particularly in the vast, sparsely populated areas such as Southeast Alaska. This data scarcity limits the ability to adapt to, mitigate, and prepare for future avalanches. Furthermore, warming temperatures and increased rain-on-snow events are expected to alter snowpack conditions and influence avalanche frequency and magnitude, making them even harder to predict and potentially increasing the region’s vulnerability.

The Alaska CASC is identifying the conditions that lead to avalanches in Southeast Alaska, improving forecasting capabilities and enabling partners from across sectors to better understand where and when avalanches could occur in the future. 

Alaska’s waters provide prime habitat for five species of Pacific salmon that drive annual commercial harvests worth hundreds of millions of dollars, contribute to the state’s billion-dollar sportfishing industry, and provide a subsistence food source for rural and Indigenous communities.

However, warming water temperatures and changes in streamflow due to more frequent floods and droughts are significantly altering salmon spawning habitat and threatening this vital resource. For example, in 2019, some rivers in Alaska reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit and thousands of salmon died before they could spawn. These climate-related impacts compound other threats such as habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, development, and overfishing. 

The Alaska CASC is studying how changes to Alaska’s rivers are affecting salmon, enabling managers to prioritize cost-effective restoration activities to improve salmon habitat and sustain populations for the benefit of the commercial, subsistence, and sportfishing communities.  

Rapid environmental change in Alaska is fueling the need for data on climate patterns that can help the state plan for the future. Large portions of Alaska lack weather stations, so gridded climate data is used to fill in the gaps and provide consistent coverage of variables like temperature, precipitation, and wind.

However, modeling climate patterns is notoriously difficult in Alaska. Factors like steep mountains, a complex coastline, ice sheets, and extreme seasonal temperature make it difficult to accurately model temperature and precipitation in Alaska using readily available global climate models. To make these models more relevant for local-scale decision-making, they must be “downscaled”, a process that increases the spatial resolution of the data to better capture Alaska’s unique environmental conditions.

The Alaska CASC develops downscaled, high-resolution climate datasets for Alaska, providing data that are critical for planning air, ground, and naval operations; hydropower operations; infrastructure development; and the management of natural resources.