The scientific opening seminar for the Nansen-Tutu Centre for Marine Environmental Research has during the last days gathered 90 scientist and students in Cape Town, South Africa. The seminar is organized in collaboration with Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa.

The seminar focus on the research challenges in monitoring and predicting ocean state in the waters surrounding South Africa where strong cold and warm ocean currents interacts, periodic upwelling occurs and with a complex, diverse and vulnerable marine ecosystem.

Professor Ola M. Johannessen, executive chairman of the Board of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway was appointed ”Visiting Professor for Senior International Scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)” for 2010. The diploma, signed by Prof. Lu Yongxiang, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was presented to him by Prof. Hui-Jun Wang, Director for ”Institute of Atmospheric Physics of CAS” in Beijing on Tuesday October 26th. Prof. Johannessen delivered then his first guest lecture titled ”Arctic climate, present and future perspectives”.

On September 30 Dr. Vitaly Alexandrov at Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre (NIERSC) in St. Petersburg successfully defended his Doctor of Sciences thesis in Oceanography. The title of his thesis is "Satellite radar monitoring of the Arctic sea ice".

The defense was carried out at the Scientific Council of Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, headed by Dr. I. Frolov. The official opponents were Professor G.A. Lebedev (AARI), Professor V.I. Binenko (Center of Ecological Safety of RAS/State Russian Hydrometeorological University), and Professor A.V.

In the middle of September every year the minimum sea ice extent appears in the Arctic Ocean – so also this year. Both the Northeast- and Northwest- passages are ice free and open for ship traffic. According to the ArcticROOS analysis of satellite microwave data the minimum sea ice area occurred on September 8th 2010 with an ice area of 4.12 mill. km2 in the Arctic Ocean. The sea ice area was then 16% larger that the previous minimum observed in 2007.

The ice area during the 2010 minimum ice extent in the Arctic Ocean (Figure 1) is 4.12 mill.

In the September issue of Deep Sea Research Cecilie Hansen, E. Kvaleberg and Annette Samuelsen publish the paper “Anticyclonic eddies in the Norwegian Sea; their generation, evolution and impact on primary production”.

In the paper they use satellite radar altimetry and ocean color observations in combination with a coupled physical-primary production ocean model to investigate anticyclonic eddies at two locations in the Norwegian Sea. Of particular interest are the formation of the anticyclonic eddies, and their influence on primary production.

Pavel Sakov and Laurent Bertino conducted a comparative study of two non-adaptive localisation methods popular in operational oceanographic and atmospheric data assimilation systems: covariance localisation (CL) and local analysis (LA). Both methods are applied mainly on empirical basis, and the relation between them remains largely unknown.

The authors conclude that while CL and LA are essentially different methods, in practice they normally produce essentially similar results. Apart from this main conclusion, the study contains a number of interesting theoretical advances.

The Nansen Centers in Bergen and St. Petersburg have published result and knowledge obtained through a wide range of joint Norwegian and Russian scientific research projects starting in 1992 with the foundation of the Nansen International Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre (NIERSC) in St. Petersburg.

Several of these books have been published through Praxis Publishers, UK (http://www.praxis-publishing.co.uk/) and their cooperation with Springer (http://www.springer.com/).

In the EU-funded ACOBAR project (Acoustic technology for observing the interior of the Arctic Ocean) an ocean monitoring system for acoustic tomography and navigation is under deployment in the Fram Strait. The system will consist of three acoustic transceivers in a triangle and a receiver array in the middle (see upper part of the Figure - A-B-C are transceivers, D is the receiver). This system will provide acoustic travel times for model validation, assimilation and temperature inversions along 6 tracks in the Fram Strait.

The Nansen Center continues to monitor faith of the 270 km2 “Petermann Ice Island (2010)” that broke off from the Petermann Glacier on northeast Greenland on August 5th.

According to the attached Landsat image the Petermann Ice Island (2010) has on August 15th drifted about 8.5 km out (north-westward) in the Petermann fjord.

See also initial news story from the Nansen Center:

http://www.nersc.no/main/index2.php?display=moreinfo&news_id=322&display...