AWAKE: Arctic Climate and Environment of the Nordic Seas and the Svalbard – Greenland Area
The project is funded under the Polish-Norwegian Research Fund 2009-2011
Objectives
The main objective of AWAKE is to clarify the role of ocean and atmospheric circulation in the climate and environmental changes in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic. The project will investigate interactions of key climate processes in the atmosphere, ocean and cryosphere. In particular the inflow of Atlantic Water transport, the fresh water budget and the exchange of water masses between deep seas, shelves and fjords will be investigated. Century-long observations of air temperature and hydrography data will be used to study decadal variability and trends
Project Summary
The project is multidisciplinary, focusing on collection of new data as well as analysis of historical data on atmospheric, oceanic and cryospheric processes. The variability and trends in the data will be investigated in order to quantify the most important climate processes. There will be special focus on studying the links between the processes to improve our understanding of causes and effects of climate change in the region. The collected data will be compared to climate model simulations in order to validate and improve air-ice-ocean models. The project is based on collaboration between experienced oceanographers, meteorologist, glaciologists, and modellers, using data collection, data analysis, model simulations and synthesis of observations and modelling results . The project will utilize existing resources and infrastructure in the Arctic provided by the partners, in particular in Svalbard. The resources include research vessels, research stations, instrumentation and observing platforms, databases and long term time series of key climate parameters (air temperature, hydrography, sea ice and glacier data) The partners also have extensive models for atmosphere, ocean and sea ice that will be used to compare with observational data collected in the project.
Polish partners:
INSTYTUT OCEANOLOGII PAN, UNIWERYSTET MIKOŁAJA KOPERNIKA - INSTYTUT GEOGRAFII, UNIWERSYTET ŚLĄSKI
Norwegian partners:
NERSC, met.no, UNIS, NPI
