News, events, and reports

News

December 2020. --- 1st Stakeholder Advisory Group Meeting

The first Stakeholder Advisory Group (SAG) meeting took place 7th December 2020. The Group includes Troels Jacobsen (Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators), Eivind Rinde (BarentsWatch), Lisbeth Håvik (Royal Norwegian Navy), Tor Are Vaskinn (Fiskebåt), Terje Brinck Løyning (Maritimt Forum Nord). The project partners presented their project tasks to the SAG and, in addition, presented projects (PRISMAS, SALIENSEAS, ICEYSEAS) which are connected to the main objective of the FOCUS project. The presentation were followed by an interesting discussion between the SAG and the FOCUS project team on the identification of barriers and opportunities toward value-added sea-ice and weather services.

February 2021 --- Launch of sea-ice / ocean drifters

A photo As part of our coupled forecast model developments we received funding in the FOCUS project to manifacture drifters, which measure sea-ice/ocean drift and wave activity. We had the opportunitiy to join the Nansen Legacy Process Cruise in February 2021 and deploy in total 12 of the FOCUS drifters, in addition to the 6 drifters developed by Jean Rabault in the DOFI project. These observations are crucial for our development of the coupled weather/wave/ice/ocen forecasting system. We acknowledge the support from Jean Rabault and Øyvind Breivik in the preparation, development, and deployment of the drifters. A video of the drift trajectories, the sea-ice fields, and significant wave height and direction can be found here.

Reports and Papers

.

Coupled weather - wave forecasting system for the European Arctic

Thomas, E. E., M. Müller, P. Bohliner, Y. Batrak, N. Szapiro (2021) A kilometer-scale coupled atmosphere-wave forecasting system for the European Arctic, Weather and Forecasting [ref]

Machine Learning for sea-ice forecast calibration.

Palerme, C. and M. Müller (2021) Calibration of sea-ice drift forecasts using random forest algorithms, The Cryosphere,15 (8) [ref]

Developments of Drifters

Rabault J. et al. (2022) OpenMetBuoy-v2021: An Easy-to-Build, Affordable, Customizable, Open-Source Instrument for Oceanographic Measurements of Drift and Waves in Sea Ice and the Open Ocean. Geosciences,12 110 [ref]