Blue-Action is creating a climate service for ski resorts in Finland

Snowmaking is a tough business! The team in Blue-Action partnered together with the ski resort RUKA for implementing an innovative service for securing sustainable snow for Winter tourism.

How? Find out and Watch this impressive video

Podcast: The push for predicting the future climate (16 August 2019)

Who: Helene Langhaug, researcher of Blue-Action at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center and the research group for Climate Dynamics and Prediction is interviewed by her colleague, Stephen Outten, researcher at Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center and the research group for Climate Dynamics and Prediction.

Topic: Climate prediction and the push for going beyond projections and start predicting how the future climate will be.

Present in the studio and responsible for recording and editing, Ingjald Pilskog, associated professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Difficult task of retrieving our oceanographic moorings and weather station in Greenland

The photo is more symbolic than scientific.

The picture was taken by Steffen M. Olsen (DMI), the coordinator of Blue-Action, on Thu 13 June 2019 around mid afternoon local time on sea ice, in the middle of Inglefield Fjord. Steffen, the colleagues and the dogs are not on the ice sheet, dogs are running on sea ice flooded by surface melt water. Rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt wateron top. The local hunters and their dogs are really experienced, daily life in the high Arctic. We rely on traditional knowledge in the field though of course insisting on analyzing available satellite scenes in the joint planning. The ice is around 1.2 m thick and that we have about 870 m water below us. Together with the local hunters we have been measuring also ice thickness from December to now. The photo illustrates a natural phenomenon, we should as such not be concerned. However, these days were characterized by extreme and early melting rates on Greenland. The temperatures in Qaanaaq 13 June 2019 were less than half a degrees from the record of June 30 2012 and obviously reached two weeks earlier.

Communities in Greenland rely on the sea ice for transport, hunting and fishing. Extreme events, here flooding of the ice by abrupt onset of surface melt call for an increased predictive capacity in the Arctic. Local hunters are however experienced with melt water flooding of the ice. This photo illustrates arctic warming and in particular the expectation that weather will be more extreme in the future.

And if you as still wondering: yes, we managed to retrieve the equipment we had to retrieve, after three attempts, but we managed! The mission was successful!

With his smartphone, Steffen Olsen (DMI) also managed to record a short video, less than a minute long, of the ride with the sledge and the dogs. Watch the video on Twitter:

Quarterly newsletter

The newsletter is related to the contents of the projects, publications, and results achieved. It targets the partners of the Blue-Action consortium. Two useful links here for you:

• Have you missed our last newsletter? You can browse the list of the past issues on Mailchimp
• Would you like to register for the newsletter? You can register on Mailchimp

Webinar Decadal predictability of North Atlantic blocking and the NAO

Presenter: Panos Athanasiadis, CSP Division - CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, Italy 
Moderator: Annalisa Cherchi, ODA Division - CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, Italy

On YouTube

An open invitation for collaboration with DMI on pioneering Arctic research

The video is an open invitation for Arctic research collaboration. The video was launched at AGU in 2017.

AGU TV 2017, produced by WebsEdge/Education is covering the AGU Fall Meeting, the largest and preeminent Earth and space meeting in the world. 11-15 December 2017 in New Orleans. 

Total time 5:18 minutes on YouTube

Feature on Climate Services on Arctic Issue of ECO Magazine with Blue-Action inputs

The Blue-Action team, Hannah Grist (SRSL) and Mark Payne (DTU Aqua) contributed an article on climate services to a special Arctic Issue of ECO Magazine, written for those working in marine environments. Read more about the importance of working with end-users to understand what science is needed to adapt to changing climates. Feature: "Climate Services: How Arctic Science can help up change with the climate" 

Article highlighting Blue-Action work by European Commission

Blue-Action has been highlighted by the European Commission for its work on understanding and predicting climate extremes. Success story: "Arctic models to inform North Hemisphere weather forecasts" (published 8 February 2019). Read more here: http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?artid=49906

Why don't we have fish forecasts?

Blue-Action's Mark Payne (DTU Aqua) tackles this and other questions about forecasting in a new blog for Polar Prediction Matters: Cloudy with Passing Schools of Tuna – Why Don’t We Have Forecasts of Fish?

16 January 2018 Press release "Scientists and stakeholders anticipate alternative futures for remote Russian Arctic region"

On December 8, 2017, Vladimir Putin visited the remote Yamal Peninsula Western Siberia to celebrate the launch of the extensive international Yamal liquefied natural gas (LNG) project. At the same time, a group of Russian and international scientists and stakeholders from science, media, non-governmental organizations and indigenous groups gathered in Moscow to discuss the development prospects of the same region, the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, as part of the “Yamal 2040” workshop series... >>Read more in the press release (PDF)

28 April 2017 The Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences awarded Russian funding for mirrowing Blue-Action proposal!

Partner Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS), represented by the PI Vladimir Semenov, has been awarded Russian funding by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science for taking part in the Blue-Action activities.

IAP RAS will in particularly contribute to the following:

• Impact of rapidly warming Arctic and decreasing sea ice extent on atmosphere circulation in high- and mid-latitudes including related extreme events.  
• Future scenarios of greenhouse gases’ emissions from the North Eurasia and methane emissions from the North Eurasian shelf.
• Quantifying relative roles of internal climate variability and external forcing in the Arctic climate changes on different time scales, identifying climate feedbacks responsible for amplified climate change in the Arctic.

IAP RAS will be actively involved in:

-WP3: WP3 Linkages of Arctic climate changes to lower latitudes (Yongqi Gao/NERSC, Co-lead:  Guillaume Gastineau/LOCEAN)-WP8 Communication, dissemination, engagement and exploitation (Lead: Raeanne Miller/SRSL, co-lead; Peter Normann Vangsbo Climate-KIC)

More information: please contact Vladimir Semenov (IAP RAS)

17 March 2017 Alain Juppé visiting EPOC labs "Ces labos sont des pépites!"

Alain Juppé, former prime Minister of France, mayor of Bordeaux, visited EPOC, our partner, and got briefed about our project by Didier Swingedouw. More info about Juppé's visit in the French media: Article in French only!

3 April 2017 Blue-Action on Zenodo

We are in the process of uploading presentations and reports in Zenodo, to grant open access to full materials in our project. Have a look at the Blue-Action community: https://zenodo.org/communities/blue-actionh2020

The Maritime Executive on WOC participation in Blue-Action, 19 January 2017

WOC joins Blue-Action project

The World Ocean Council (WOC) has been selected as the only international business organization to participate in the European project Blue-Action. Read the full article

#Storify of #BlueAction in Berlin, January 2017

Curious to know how did the kickoff meeting go?

Read the full on #Storify

20 January 2017 High North News interviews Kathrin Keil (IASS) on Warming Arctic - Extreme Events

High North News interviews Kathrin Keil, Blue-Action WP5 co-leader on the warming Arctic, extreme events, joining multi-disciplinary forces and the importance of climate services  Read the full article

Press release 19 Jan 2017: WOC Partners in Research on Impact of Arctic Changes

This press-release was launched at the opening of the first meeting of Blue-Action: read the full version of the WOC press release

Press release: 12 December 2016, Climate-KIC,  Blue-action’ to help society cope with the impacts of dramatic Arctic climate changes

The Blue-Action project will seek to reach out to the private sector decision makers and actively engage with them to enhance response capacity to climate change challenges and foster transfer and use of project results via Climate-KIC, which will in turn boost economic growth. Climate-KIC is responsible for the Work Package 8 and will be in charge of communication and dissemination to a broad European business community including shipping, oil and gas, fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, renewable energy (wind, wave, tidal), ports, dredging, cables and pipelines, carbon capture and storage, as well as the maritime legal, financial and insurance communities Read the full version of the CKIC press release

Photo: courtesy of Climate-KIC

Press release: 1 December 2016: Scientists take "blue-action" to help society cope with the impacts of dramatic Arctic climate changes

While the Arctic faces rapid warming and less sea ice currently covers the Arctic Ocean than ever before at this time of the year, an international partnership launches a major project to improve our detailed understanding of the processes and impacts of this changing climate and to construct better long-term forecast systems for the increasingly extreme weather of the Arctic and the wider northern hemisphere.

Blue-Action is a four-year research and innovations project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme with €7.5 million investment. It brings together 116 experts from 40 organisations in 17 countries on three continents working in academia, local authorities and maritime industries.

Pooling their expertise, skills, approaches and networks, the partners aim to improve how we describe, model and predict the weather and climate on seasonal to decadal time scales in the Arctic and over the northern hemisphere. This information will allow communities and businesses in Eurasia and North America to develop and plan their activities better.

“We will deliver this by synthesizing observations, assessing model performance, conducting coordinated multi-model sensitivity experiments, reducing and evaluating the uncertainty in prediction systems and developing new initialization techniques” explains Dr Daniela Matei from the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, one of two coordinators of the project.

“Working directly with local communities, businesses operating in the Arctic and industrial organisations, Blue-Action will demonstrate new opportunities for growth through tailored climate services. These will give users the information they need to live and work safely and successfully in the rapidly changing regions in and surrounding the Arctic” says project coordinator Dr Steffen M Olsen from the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen.

“We are starting today to reach out to the many communities and businesses in the far north to work with us to guide our research direction and to co-develop adaptation mechanisms that will allow them to not only sustain but to boost their performance,” says Steffen Olsen.

“We will collaborate with other modelling and observational climate projects funded within the JPI-Climate Belmont-Forum, EU-H2020 frameworks to maximise the synergy and efficiency of our research efforts,” adds Dr Matei.

While the project begins its work on 1^st December 2016, the Blue-Action kick-off meeting will be held 18-20 January 2017 at the Max Planck Society’s Harnack-Haus in Berlin.

Read the full press release: Blue-Action

Photo: courtesy of Dirk Notz, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

5 November 2016 Arctic Resilience Report published

The Arctic Resilience Report was published on 25 November 2016: "Environmental, ecological, and social changes are happening faster than ever in the Arctic, and are accelerating. They are also more extreme, well beyond what has been seen before. This means the integrity of Arctic ecosystems is increasingly challenged, threatening the sustainability of current ways of life in the Arctic and likely disruption of global climate and ecosystems."

Watch the recording of the launch event "What is at stake in the Arctic?"

Download the Report