Earth’s climate is a very complex system, and it is not easy to understand with all its components – the main ones being ocean, land, atmosphere, and sea ice. Nevertheless, scientists have been trying for decades to predict future changes in climate with numerical models. These models keep getting better, but all components have systematic errors to some degree. Decreasing errors and thereby predicting the future climate more reliably will benefit society by allowing us to better adapt to climate change. 

A simple sum of all the contributors to sea level rise reinforces confidence in Earth observation data

About every 14 years, a significant temperature change is observed in the ocean between Greenland and Svalbard. Why, you wonder? Well, the Gulf Stream transports warm water northwards and on a regular basis, the water is even warmer and saltier than normally. These variations are regular, but can we predict these changes reliably? 

We can predict the weather about 10 days ahead of time, and climate projections look at how the climate will look like a hundred years from now. In between, we find a new field of science: climate prediction. A new publication describes how good our Norwegian Climate Prediction Model is at predicting the climate for our near future.

Changes in climate have wide-reaching implications for life on Earth. By looking at the past climate we can understand ongoing processes better. But global datasets covering the past climate have too low resolutions to be useful for small-scale investigations like crop yield modelling – until now!

The Nansen Scientific Society (NANSI) was founded as an ideal independent foundation under the slogan “Knowledge without borders”. During these 15 years 52 students have been supported with educational or mobility grants, 11 research schools have been co-funded and the overall activities have resulted in 60 scientific publications. The Nansen Center congratulates NANSI with its great achievements for the first 15 years.

11 students and researchers from NERSC and the University of Bergen participated in a 3-day cruise to Bjørnafjorden south of Bergen and the surrounding area, with the Norwegian Coast Guard vessel KV Tor. The cruise was a part of the SFI Smart Ocean project preparing for a mesoscale observing system using acoustic technology.

Edson Silva just published his first article as part of his institutional PhD project - congratulations! Together with five other co-authors from NERSC and one from the University of Bergen (UiB), he studied the annual cycle of phytoplankton/algae blooms in the Nordic Seas by utilizing satellite data from 2000-2020.

What is phytoplankton?

A new publication in Nature shows that a shift in air circulation is responsible for the eastern African climate having changed to dry conditions about two million years ago. The authors studied a marine core to prove their hypothesis. Björn Backeberg is a co-author – he has an adjunct position with NERSC and is affiliated with Deltares in the Netherlands and the Nansen-Tutu Centre for Marine Environmental Research in South Africa.