Sila qanuippa? (how's the weather?): Integrating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and environmental forecasting products to support travel safety around Pond Inlet, Nunavut in a changing climate

Abstract

Abstract As Inuit hunters living in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, we (Natasha Simonee and Jayko Alooloo) travel extensively on land, water, and sea ice. Climate change, including changing sea ice and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, has made it riskier and harder for us to travel and hunt safely. Inuit knowledge supporting safe travel is also changing and shared less between generations. We increasingly use online weather, marine, and ice products to develop locally relevant forecasts. This helps us to make decisions according to wind, waves, precipitation, visibility, sea ice conditions, and floe edge location. We apply our forecasts and share them with fellow community members to support safe travel. In this paper, we share the approach we developed from over a decade of systematically and critically assessing forecasting products such as: Windy.com; weather and marine forecasts; tide tables; C-CORE’s floe edge monitoring service; SmartICE; ZoomEarth; and time lapse cameras. We describe the strengths and challenges we face when accessing, interpreting, and applying each product throughout different seasons. Our analysis highlights a disconnect between available products and local needs. This disconnect can be overcome by service providers adjusting services to include: more seasonal and real-time information, non-technical language, familiar units of measurement, data size proportional to internet access cost and speed, and clear relationships between weather/marine/ice information and safe travel. Our findings have potential relevance in the Circumpolar Arctic and beyond, wherever people combine Indigenous weather forecasting methods and online information for decision-making. We encourage service providers to improve product relevance and accessibility.