With shore-fast sea ice disappearing along the coast of the Chukchi Sea causing winds with deep snow drifts, variable snowpack in Bristol Bay in Alaska, and winters without snow in West Central Montana, youth from these areas have personal stories of environmental changes witnessed firsthand. In a virtual “Dirty Snow” citizen science STEM engagement program that met weekly for 5-weeks, middle and high school youth across different time zones and cultures shared such snow stories, implemented a protocol to measure light absorbing particles (LAPs) in snow, and conducted their own Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) snowpack and pH investigations. Teachers, parents and researchers teamed up to support students as they asked their own questions about how LAPs affect their local communities and measured, collected, filtered, and analyzed snow samples. Students learned that LAPs in snow affect the Earth’s climate system by reducing snow reflectivity, affecting albedo. On a local scale, LAPs capture heat energy leading to snow loss. Students wondered if LAPs also affect water quality. Middle school students from Shishmaref, Alaska (located on an island in the Chukchi Sea) selected snow sampling locations in areas important to their community’s resilience to climate change, such as the sole water supply lagoon. The Shishmaref students shared their results with their community, showcased their project in both the GLOBE International Virtual Science Symposium and a tribal climate resilience webinar, and have been featured in the July 2021 Association of Women in Science Magazine issue on sustainability and innovation. In this session, we will share the lessons learned from multiple perspectives - including surveyed youth participants - on conducting a remote synchronous and asynchronous STEM and climate resilience engagement on a short timescale.

Reliable, high-resolution sea ice forecasts may help contribute to safety of Indigenous marine mammal hunting and community travel in the Arctic. At the same time, sea ice forecasts could also be useful predictors of seasonal harvest success, including potential harvest shortfalls with impacts at the community level. However, large scale measures of sea ice concentration and ice extent are not sufficient indicators for predicting marine mammal harvest success in Bering Strait communities. Weekly sea ice and weather forecasts for Alaskan communities in the Bering Strait were analyzed from the Sea Ice for Walrus Outlook (SIWO) to identify sea ice and weather thresholds that greatly affected Indigenous marine mammal hunting activity and access to marine mammals during the spring harvest. The forecast of the timing for ice-free waters around a coastal community generally aligned with local observations. However some hunters continued to hunt by traveling longer distances from shore to reach marine mammals. This emphasizes the importance of maintaining coastal and marine forecasts even when coastal areas around communities appear ice-free. It was also apparent that while wind forecasts generally predicted the local wind conditions that were observed, the forecasts sometimes omitted important changes in wind direction, speed or ice movement, that occasionally resulted in ocean and ice conditions that required local search and rescue efforts or left hunters “stuck in the ice” overnight. The use of seasonal sea ice forecasts from models have not yet been explored with community partners as a potential tool to plan for upcoming subsistence hunting seasons, although the current use of SIWO is recognized as a tool to record hunter observations in “our words and descriptions” for current events and for future use and analysis. An evaluation of the Sea Ice for Walrus Outlook is being conducted, and the results of this new study will be useful to support future development of forecast information, and avenues for sharing of timely community observations.