Promoting respect and working with Arctic Indigenous communities
Since its inception, the NGEE Arctic project has worked hard to develop and promote a culture of safety, respect, and inclusion.

Since its inception, the NGEE Arctic project has worked hard to develop and promote a culture of safety, respect, and inclusion.
The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than any other biome on Earth, resulting in widespread changes in vegetation composition, structure, and function that have important feedbacks to the global climate system.
The Arctic tundra biome has become a hot spot of global environmental change because the vegetation and permafrost soils are strongly influenced by warming air temperatures and declining sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. In the late 1990s, global satellite observations revealed a sharp increase in the apparent productivity of tundra vegetation, a phenomenon that has come to be known as Arctic greening. Arctic greening is dynamically linked with Earth’s changing climate, interacting in complex ways with permafrost thaw, snow and sea ice change, and disturbances. However, the greening trend has not been universal, and some areas in the Arctic are even experiencing an opposite browning trend in response to disturbance and extreme weather events.
The anticipated approach for NGEE Arctic Phase 4 leverages computational, diagnostic, remote sensing, and data synthesis tools to quantify improvements in prediction of climate–ecosystem feedbacks at the global scale in an Arctic-informed version of the land surface component of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). NGEE Arctic Phase 4 will deliver an unprecedented ability to predict the consequences of interacting Arctic processes for the global climate.
The presence and thawing of permafrost strongly control both gradual and catastrophic movements of soil on watershed hillslopes in complex and often difficult to predict patterns and rates.
Nitrous oxide strongly inhibits CH4 and MeHg formation, resulting from the complicated interplay of microbial processes in anoxic soils that ultimately determine how climate change will influence greenhouse gas formation and mercury transformation in the Arctic ecosystem.