Yesterday NERSC hosted a kick off meeting of a new big national project called ALERTNESS (Advanced models and weather prediction in the Arctic: New capabilities from observations and polar process representations). ALERTNESS is a large-scale national research project with the total funding of 23 million NOK.

From ALERTNESS-kick off

Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre hosted the first meeting of the ALERTNESS partners on February 13^th, 2018. The event connected 16 researchers from The Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway), University of Bergen (UiB), Uni Research (UNI), University of Tromsø (UiT), The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC), The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS).

ALERTNESS takes an innovative and comprehensive approach to address the growing need for accurate and reliable weather predictions in the Arctic, especially in relation to high-impact weather. Rapid climatic and environmental changes, and an increasing human presence in the region, have all triggered an immediate need for both applied and basic research advances to improve Arctic weather prediction. The project will develop new methods to tackle long-standing issues in atmospheric models in polar environments, and to continually evaluate these methods against data from the ongoing Year Of Polar Prediction observations. It will explore new ways to diagnose uncertainties evolving from representations of small-scale processes, and generate substantial advances in probabilistic forecasting for the Arctic.

NERSC researchers Igor Esau and Stephen Outten will contribute to these national efforts with their expertise in the process modeling at the polar air-land-sea-ice interface. They will implement a new turbulence paradigm into the consortium numerical weather prediction model AROME Arctic. This new development should significantly improve our ability to predict extreme cold weather event in harsh arctic climate.