Category: Outreach and Events

Research Visit at The University Centre in Svalbard

Marianne Williams-Kerslake is a PhD student at the Nansen Center looking at marine heatwaves in the Arctic Ocean. Marine heatwaves are periods of extreme high sea surface temperatures relative to long-term trends. The annual intensity, frequency (number of events per year), and duration of marine heatwaves have increased in the Arctic Ocean in recent decades. In particular, a high frequency of marine heatwaves has been observed around the Svalbard archipelago, leading Marianne to focus on this area. Marianne has been using TOPAZ, a physical reanalysis for the Arctic Ocean, to characterise marine heatwaves around Svalbard. In the autumn of 2024, supported by the Bjerknes Climate Prediction Unit, she travelled to The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) for 2.5 months. She was there to validate and compare marine heatwaves in TOPAZ to observations (measurements) that have been gathered from multiple moorings around Svalbard.  This is an exciting opportunity and will enable us to determine how effectively TOPAZ can capture marine heatwave events in this region.

Using observations to assess the effectiveness of the TOPAZ model in portraying marine heatwave events contributes to the research aims of the Bjerknes Climate Prediction Unit, particularly, RA3 – assessing the limits of climate prediction. We will be able to quantify the impact of model errors/limitations on TOPAZ projections of marine heatwaves, increasing our understanding of systems such as TOPAZ.

“Working at UNIS and experiencing life and the nature in Svalbard was an amazing experience. I worked in the Arctic Geophysics group and was supervised by Ragnheid Skogseth and Frank Nilsen. It was fascinating and inspiring to learn about the wide range of research going on at UNIS; in the Arctic Geophysics group alone, there were a variety of projects from Aurora research and polar space missions to essential climate monitoring. During my visit, I obtained encouraging results regarding the accuracy of TOPAZ’s performance in the Svalbard region. I am now in the process of writing up these findings for my first paper. I  hope to return to Svalbard for the later studies in my PhD and continue collaboration between the Bjerknes Center and UNIS.” – Marianne Williams-Kerslake

 

Workshop: Chinese-Norwegian Collaboration Projects within Climate Systems, 5-8th August 2024 in Bergen, Norway, successfully completed!

From the 5th to the 8th August 2024, more than a hundred climate researchers meet to discuss research from a Norwegian-Chinese collaboration on climate research.

More than fifty participants come from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, and Fudan University, all Nansen-Zhu partners. Others come from China Ocean University, Sun Yat-Sen University, Danish Meteorological Institute, Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the University of Reading.

Read the article: Cooperation across Eurasia.
Read more about this workshop and the workshop programme: Chinese-Norwegian-climsys-2024workshop.

Workshop on Climate Prediction and Services over the Atlantic-Arctic region, 27-30th May 2024, successfully completed!

From the 27th to the 30th May 2024, 105 researchers gathered under the rain clouds in Bergen to discuss the science of climate prediction and services. Joined by an additional 60 colleagues online, the community gathered experts from 19 countries across 5 continents. The program included 6 keynote talks, 30 oral presentations, 5 break-out groups, 60 pitch presentations and a 2-hr “society meets science” side-event of 37 participants. Read more about this and consult the workshop programme and more here: https://bcpu.w.uib.no/workshop-may2024/.

Group photo of workshop participants taken on hotel staircase
Workshop participants in Bergen (not all are represented)

Global temperatures predicted to reach new extremes in the next five years

The annual WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update by the World Meteorological Organization was released last week. This is a synthesis of the global annual to decadal predictions for the period 2023-2027. The BCPU team contributes to these updates by running climate predictions with the Norwegian Climate Prediction Model. Check out Henrike Wilborn’s nice newspiece about this here !

Upcoming workshop: External versus internal variability on decadal and longer time scales

On Wednesday 14th September, the CLIVAR Climate Dynamics Panel (CDP) will launch the first of an intended series of annual CDP workshops. This year’s workshop will target our understanding of internal and externally forced variability in the climate system, their interaction on decadal timescales and longer, and the effects of variability on extreme events. To foster discussion that will stimulate focused research on this important topic, the workshop aims to tackle the following overarching questions:

  • How to isolate the relative contributions of external and internal variability to observed decadal and longer variability?
  • How do the various external forcings modulate internal variability?
  • How to progress in narrowing observational and modeling uncertainties in external and internal variability?
  • What are the effects of external and internal variability on extreme events?

The workshop will be online, and consist of six, weekly 2-hour sessions, from September 14th to October 19th, 2022. The sessions will be on Wednesdays with the timings varying to accommodate participation from different time zones.

Workshop program and further event information: https://www.clivar.org/events/clivar-climate-dynamics-panel-cdp-annual-workshop-external-versus-internal-variability

 

Prediction of the Northeast Arctic cod biomass in the Barents Sea

Mariko Koseki joined BCPU as an intern in autumn 2021. Mariko has a Masters in Environmental Science which she obtained at Hokkaido University in Japan.

“I, Mariko Koseki, am an intern within BCPU, and I have been working with Dr. Anne Britt Sandø at the Institute of Marine Research since autumn of 2021.
During the internship, we have focused on the Northeast Arctic cod (NEA cod/Gadus Morhua) biomass in the Barents Sea and developed regression models to predict variations in cod biomass in the future.
The NEA cod is one of the most important species in the Barents Sea for both the ecosystem and as a commercial stock. Several earlier studies reported that the recent warming condition in the Barents Sea has led to high cod biomass.
To construct regression models for total stock biomass of the NEA cod, we used hydrographic and biological variables, such as temperature, salinity, sea ice fraction, primary- and secondary production as explanatory variables. These variables were obtained from hindcast simulations with regional ocean and ecosystem models. Finally, we used the same regression models with variables from downscaled climate scenarios to project future variations in the NEA cod.
We found that several of the regression models have high prediction skills and captured the variations in total stock biomass in the Barents Sea well. Moreover, based on downscaled climate projections, we made maps of spatial distributions of cod biomass in the future. However, errors between observations and predictions of cod biomass necessitate further improvement of the regression models. Now we are preparing to publish this study as a scientific article.
I would like to thank everyone who has supported my internship, and I hope to make use of my experience in my next steps.” – Mariko

On the trail of the disappearing polar sea ice

Jakob Dörr is a PhD student at the University of Bergen, working with Marius Årthun in the BCPU research area on “Understanding mechanisms for climate predictability”. In the spring of 2022, he travelled to California, to visit Dave Bonan. For four weeks, Jakob had the opportunity to work with Dave and his working group at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Dave is also a PhD student, and also interested in understanding present and future changes in the Earth’s sea ice cover, and which processes these are caused by.

In the Arctic, the sea ice cover has strongly declined in all seasons over the last 40 years, and this is mostly due to the Earth’s warming, driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However, because the sea ice interacts with the ocean and the atmosphere and is thus part of the chaotic climate system, it is affected by random fluctuations and internal variability which is independent from the long-term warming trend. These variability modes can affect the sea ice for periods of up to several decades. It is therefore not entirely clear exactly how much of the sea ice loss we have observed over the last decades was due to global warming, and how much was because of internal variability. Dave and Jakob are working to detect and separate those variability modes that affect the sea ice over long periods (decades and longer) in the observational record of sea ice. They use a novel technique developed by Robb Wills at the University of Washington.

Jakob and Dave are hoping to determine for different regions of the Arctic, which modes of variability affect the sea ice cover, and how much their influence compares to the long-term sea ice loss due to global warming. This will help to understand and attribute past sea ice changes and enhance our ability to predict the future regional sea ice loss. While Jakob focuses on the Arctic, Dave applies the same technique to the Antarctic, where a steady increase in sea ice cover over the last decades, followed by a strong decline since 2016, has been observed. Their analysis might shed some light on the mechanisms behind this puzzling evolution, and how much of it was caused by changes due to global warming. The goal of the BCPU-supported visit was to prepare work for two separate publications on Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, respectively, and to discuss how experience from observations can be applied to analyse climate model simulations of future sea ice change.


“During the visit, we exchanged our experience and discussed new ideas for our analysis. I also got to meet scientists in both the Oceanography (Andrew Thompson) and the Climate Dynamics (Tapio Schneider) group at Caltech. I was also lucky to come at a time where Caltech was opening fully again, with many international scientists visiting the institute. Furthermore, I got invited to be part of a sea ice reading course where we had intense discussions about sea ice models, trends and mechanisms with Dave and other members of the Oceanography group. On top of that, I had the chance to visit some friends from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego. I had a lot of interactions during the visit and learned a lot about how science is conducted at Caltech and other US institutions. I hope that I can continue the collaboration between Caltech and the Bjerknes Center beyond our work on sea ice observations. The visit showed me how important it is to physically meet people to exchange ideas and develop collaborations across the globe. There are plans that Dave visits us in Bergen next spring, and I hope to return to Pasadena after that.” – Jakob Dörr

Predicting Arctic sea ice for the marine transport sector

Image credit: Copernicus Marine Service

Check out this nice article by Dr. Ellen Viste at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, on the evaluation of sea ice models and how far we are to being able to provide reliable, near-term sea-ice predictions:

Read the article: Predicting Arctic sea ice.

In it, we hear from Tarkan Bilge, our BCPU data manager, and his recent paper on sea ice thickness forecasts to support Arctic marine transport, together with other collaborating scientists at our partner, NERSC, among others.