It will soon be possible for scientists, governments, NGOs and the public in general to access detailed climate model data based on information that includes past and current weather trends in Europe's coldest regions. Such information is crucial not only for scientists, but also for governments and citizens if they are to prepare for the consequences of changing weather patterns that are likely to bring social and economic upheaval.

"What happens in the Arctic is extremely important to Europe in many ways. There has been discussion about how melting ice there could cool the continent by shutting down the Gulf Stream, the 'conveyor belt' that brings warm water north. However, there is currently no sign of such a shut down, and now Europe seems to be warming faster than most other areas of the world, possibly by as much as 2.0 degree C to 6.3 degree C by 2100", explained Rune Solberg of the Norwegian Computing Center.

Rune Solberg co-ordinated the EuroClim project, an initiative partly financed by the European Union to develop the technology necessary for producing accurate observations and climate scenarios based on existing and new data from satellites and weather stations. The research has led to a distributed information system that should be "fully operational in a few years", Rune Solberg stated.

The project has also served as the basis of further endeavours to monitor the cryosphere - the area of the world covered by snow and ice - on an even wider scale. Among them is EuroCryoClim, a new initiative being discussed with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop an operational system for advanced and accurate observations of both the north and south polar regions. In turn, that system would feed data into larger Earth monitoring initiatives such as the Global Earth Observation (GEO) programme and Europe's Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).

"We realised there was a need to constantly monitor the Arctic more than ten years ago when measurements started to show that the climate was changing in this region much faster than elsewhere", Rune Solberg stated. "We needed to be able to understand what was going on, why the ice was melting so fast and what the consequences could be. In the ten years since we started to discuss the EuroClim concept there have been big changes. There is much less summer ice and glaciers, and Greenland's ice sheet is disappearing much faster than anyone expected."

A decade, however, is a short time in climate science. The EuroClim partners therefore started the long process of delving into the archives of satellite and meteorological station data for the past 25 years to 30 years. They calibrate it to ensure the readings are comparable and combine it with new data to feed into a vast distributed database of information about climate change in Greenland, Scandinavia and the area around the North Pole.

The technology they developed allows this data to be extracted automatically, calibrated and, through the use of advanced algorithms, to ultimately predict long-term trends. "We can look at a month in any given year, make seasonal comparisons and compare entire years. The greatest changes can be found in the seasonal variations, for instance from summer to summer in the case of sea ice", Rune Solberg stated.

The ultimate goal of the partners is to make the information available to all as a web-based service. "The aim of targeting the system to a broad variety of user groups was perhaps a little ambitious but we saw that scientists are not the only ones who want and need this information. The public, for example, is becoming increasingly interested in climate change. It is becoming a hotter and hotter issue, but there is a lot of information and people are confused about how it will affect them", Rune Solberg stated.

The EuroCryoClim project will seek to broaden the monitoring area of the EuroClim system, contributing to methods of improving climate models for the northern and southern polar regions as well as the whole world. "It is important to have European measurements and climate scenarios that can be compared to those of the United States, which is currently very much at the forefront of climate monitoring", Rune Solberg stated.

Though EuroCryoClim currently involves only Norwegian partners, Rune Solberg noted that the consortium is open to others. "Our ambition is to make the project as open and expandable as possible", he stated, noting that they are particularly interested in bringing Danish scientists who monitor Greenland's climate onboard. "Greenland is very important. If its ice sheet melts, the global sea level could rise by about seven meters", Rune Solberg warned.

More information is available at the EuroClim website.

Republished from IST Results.