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!
More than 80% of the Arctic population is living in 110 cities. Open space converts a settlement to a location with sense-of-place and values. Green (vegetated) and blue (water) spaces, being the areas of public attraction, recreation and eco-services, make cities livable. We consider green, blue and white space along with built-up areas as components of an interconnected socio-environmental (urban) ecosystem.
The project “Building Socio-Ecological Resilience through Urban Green, Blue and White Space (SERUS)” is an initiative to improve several aspects of the Arctic urban resilience. It seeks to advance a cross-disciplinary climate-ecology-policy (CEP) approach in creating the Arctic urban resilience.
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.
To develop a sea-level indicator that can be used to predict near-term (decadal) changes in extreme sea-level variability along the Norwegian coast.
Extreme sea-level events represent potentially devastating hazards and are expected to occur more frequently in the future as a consequence of rising mean sea levels (Simpson et al., 2015). Additionally, and irrespective of changes in long-term mean sea level, decadal variability modulates and will persist to modulate extreme sea-level characteristics like return heights and periods, therefore intermittently exacerbating or dampening long term changes.
To understand the consequences of more open Arctic sea water in summer and increasing ice-growth in winter for the Arctic and Eurasian climate
The rapid decline of Arctic sea ice has led to a ‘bluer’ Arctic. While at the same time, the extent and the volume of newly-formed sea ice in winter are increasing; the climate science community has largely overlooked this unforeseen change, but it has potentially profound and lasting impacts on the Arctic and the Eurasian climate.
Elucidate the multi-decadal variability of the sub-polar gyre and its relationship to merridional heat transport variations in the North Atlantic.
Bjerknes Compensation – the idea that anomalies of heat transport in the atmosphere and ocean must be approximately equal and opposite – has now been well established in the scientific literature [Shaffery and Sutton, 2006; Jungclaus and Koenigk, 2010; Outten and Esau, (submitted)]. However, studies of Bjerknes Compensation in climate models have all identified a multi-decadal variability in the heat transport anomalies, with a period of approximately 60-80 years. The mechanism underlying this multi-decadal variability has not been clearly identified.
Investigating the representation of Euriasan cooling in the CMIP5 models.
There has been great interest and debate regarding the unusually low sea ice extent (SIE) over the Arctic in recent weeks, and while the summer minimum wasn’t record breaking, it is the sea-ice’s failure to recover since then that has sparked concern. The average SIE for 1981-2010 for this late in November is around 11.5M km2, but currently it is approximately 9.25M km2, a deficit of around 20%. While such a low SIE is unprecedented for this late in the year, it is the temperature response that is even more striking (Figure 1).
Developing tools to investigate multi-scalar dynamics of extreme precipitation events over Norway.
Extreme events are often the result of interactions between large-scale atmospheric patterns and local scale features, e.g. orography. Traditional approaches to study extreme events typically focus on the importance of either the large scale (e.g. atmospheric rivers) or local scale dynamics. Multi-scalar dynamics investigates the full range of scales, taking a more holistic approach to studying extreme events.
To develop world leading capacity for the delivery of reliable and accurate Arctic weather forecasts and warnings for the benefit of maritime operations, business and society.
High-impact weather conditions, rapid climate change and limited predictability make the Arctic a challenging operating environment leading to substantial business, societal and environmental risks. ALERTNESS will meet this growing need for reliable and accurate weather predictions by addressing forecast challenges unique to the Arctic: availability and quality of observations, exploitation of satellite observations over snow
