Project Summary  Heat Budget  Collaborative Research: A Heat
Budget Analysis of the Arctic Climate System  Lead PIs:   • Mark
Serreze, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of
Colorado   • Mike Steele, Polar Science Center, University of
Washington  The Arctic System can be viewed as a set of
interconnected and interacting physical, biological and human
components. Arguably the most integrating component of the full
Arctic system is its climate system. The mean state, variability
and change in the climate system exert strong controls on
biological processes and human activities. Arctic climate is in
turn tightly coupled to the global system. This is an effort
towards synthesis of the Arctic climate system that distills the
wealth of data assembled though ARCSS and other national and
international efforts in a tractable, integrating heat budget
framework.  While the Arctic climate system is certainly
complex, in its most fundamental sense it has an elegant
simplicity. One can consider the system in ter