Climate Change at the Arctic Gateways

The consortium intends to organise an international scientific workshop entitled Climate Change at the Gateways, to develop benchmarks of ice-ocean fluxes and associated processes at the Arctic Ocean gateways, to identify their role in Arctic change and to develop a reference dataset for model skill evaluation and improvement. The workshop will be hosted at the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in Bergen and will bring together observational experts, theorists and modellers interested in better understanding physical, chemical and biological exchanges in the Arctic and Subarctic seas. The fluxes through the gateways regulate and document the exchange between the Nordic Seas, the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, processes which are highly subject to climate variability and change (Fig. 1). The time series from the oceanic gateways are, by now, sufficiently long records (~30 years) such that signals related to climate change can be identified. The time series from the oceanic gateways are, by now, sufficiently long records (~30 years) such that signals related with climate change can be identified. For any model-based climate prediction and model improvement, it is essential to have a reference base from quality checked observations. Currently, common reference for numerical models of the Northern Oceans is missing and thereby hindering an objective evaluation of their skill and thus further improvement. The product of the workshop will be a coordinated roadmap and guideline for the preparation of a benchmark dataset for each of the Arctic gateways. It will also document the requirements regarding the presentation, accessibility and formats of the data products from the benchmark website. The researchers in this proposal have long-standing experience working with the observational datasets which form the basis for the reference dataset being proposed.