In June, ten MSc students from the University of Bergen and the Western Norway University of Applied Science embarked on the coast guard vessel KV Svalbard to participate in the research school cruise near Svalbard, led by the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center. Their goal was to get hands-on experience during a scientific cruise in the Arctic.

Who were the participants?

Researchers from NERSC, NORCE, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway), and the University of Bergen recently published an article in which they evaluate how well ocean surface currents in Northern Norway’s coastal areas can be studied with satellites, compared to traditional methods.

At this moment, the Norwegian Coast Guard icebreaker KV Svalbard is on a scientific expedition on the central Arctic Ocean with eleven scientists from different Norwegian and European institutions. Demanding operations are carried out to recover deep-water moorings deployed last summer. The moorings carry instruments to observe the ocean temperatures, salinity, ‘ocean sound’, carbon dioxide, and currents below the Arctic sea ice for one year. All this to calculate the ocean temperature below the sea ice. 

A new paper published in “Remote Sensing” addresses sea ice type classification in a new and clever way: Combining machine learning and remote sensing. The first author of the paper is a former intern at NERSC who created the central algorithm within the three months he spent in Bergen, and thanks to it, classifying sea ice types might have become faster and easier!

Seeing the ice from above

Nansensenterets direktør Sebastian H. Mernild er ansatt som prorektor ved Syddansk Universitet (SDU) fra 1. oktober. Han har derfor sagt opp sin stilling som senterets direktør etter nær fire år i Bergen. 

Record breaking heat wave in Siberia amidst of COViD-19 pandemia may seriously exacerbate the death toll.

Figure 1:: Illustration of the excess deaths toll based on the figures from Financial Times recalculated per one million of people. Background photo: Omsk, May, 25, 2020.

To studier publisert i det vitenskapelige tidsskriftet Nature viser at innlandsisen på Grønland og i Antarktis smelter seks ganger raskere i dag enn på 1990-tallet. Avsmeltingen nærmer seg det Internasjonale klimapanelet (IPCC) sitt øvre scenario for global oppvarming. Dette er bekymringsfullt og indikerer at de to iskappene også reagerer på et endret klima. Avsmeltingene kan føre til en ytterligere økning i globalt havnivået på 17 cm innen 2100. 

The international ClimFishCon 2020 conference is jointly organized by Cochin University of Science and Technology, School of Industrial Fisheries and Department of Fisheries, Government of Kerala. The conference, chaired by Prof Madhusoodan Kurup, has more than 350 participants, which in parallel sessions presents the state-of-the-art research on fisheries, aquaculture and coastal infrastructure under a changing climate.

The Nansen Environmental Research Centre - India (NERCI) in Cochin was registered as a none-profit Indo-Norwegian joint-venture company in 1999 and celebrated its 20^thanniversary with its scientific partners and associates from India and 

[img_assist|nid=119752|title=|desc=Director general Anne Line Wold, Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, has just unveiled the Book on 20 years of scientific abstracts of NERCI. From left: Lasse H. Pettersson (NERSC/NERCI), Bindu G.