Enhancing the Salience of climate services for marine mobility Sectors in European Arctic Seas

The rapid warming in the Arctic has profound socio-economic consequences. Current and expected climatic changes (declines in sea ice cover) in the Arctic are propelling growth in marine mobile activities, such as shipping, tourism and fisheries. Ship-based sectors and actors are demanding more accurate and salient Arctic weather and climate predictions, which puts great expectations on our current global and regional forecasting systems. SALIENSEAS aims to understand the mobility patterns, constraints, challenges, decision-making contexts and information needs of end-users in different European Arctic marine sectors; to develop and apply participatory tools for co-producing salient climate services with Arctic marine end-users; and to co-develop user-relevant and sector specific climate services and dissemination systems dedicated to Arctic marine end-users by demonstration of seamless weather-to-climate Arctic climate services tailored to key social, environmental and economic needs. The SALIENSEAS project will bring together a team of social and natural scientists, met-ocean service personnel, and end-users in an iterative research and co-production process. Stakeholders and end-users will be directly involved in the project, both as advisors in the project management and as respondents and participants in end-user workshops. We will adopt cutting edge and partly in-house developed concepts and methodologies for effectively co-producing knowledge and knowledge systems as an overall approach to the project and as part of the work packages. SALIENSEAS has already been endorsed as a key contributing project in the implementation plans of the Year of Polar Prediction, which creates excellent opportunities for extending the approach and communicating the lessons learnt beyond the current European scope of the project. In the first year of the project we launched the website www.salienseas.com in order to inform about our project and newest activities. The first Stakeholder Advisory Group Workshop took place in January 2018 in Tromsø. Norwegian and danish Arctic marine operators from different sectors participated. As an outcome a report ?Stakeholder Advisory Group Perspectives and Project Recommendations?, has been published in April 2018. In May 2018 the WMO launched the Arctic Regional Climate Center. Salienseas actively contributed to MET Norway?s efforts in providing the data portal and web interface, as well as, participated at the WMO?s First Session of Pan-Arctic Regional Climate Forum (PARCOF). In the second project year we launched the demonstration service website (www.metno-salienseas.com) which includes short-range and seasonal sea-ice forecasts. It is a fully operational forecasting service. The quality of the forecasts and the validation methods have been documented in two peer-reviewed articles. The demonstration service has been tested in end-user work sessions together with Greenland Ice Pilots and Hurtigruten and has also been integrated into an interdisciplinary study to assess the use of uncertainty products by marine operators in their risk assessment. The demonstration service will be further developed internally at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in order to integrate it into the portfolio of the Norwegian Ice Service.

A central goal has been to bridge the gap between service providers and their maritime users, thus contributing to creating higher awareness of user needs. We focused on various sectors operating in the marine Arctic so the work achieved relevance across societal sectors/user-groups. Ultimately, the overall project resulted in the availability of improved information services for Arctic navigation, which will eventually have a large social benefit in terms of increased safety. - development of end-user-focused sea-ice verification methods - understanding of sea-ice forecast skill on time scales from days to season - important new insights into the produce-user interface at MET Norway and the impact of weather and sea ice conditions on maritime activities. - services are extensively utilizing the Copernicus infrastructure and the operational systems of MET Norway - demonstration service design has been taken up by other research and innovation projects

The rapid warming in the Arctic has profound socio-economic consequences. Current and expected climatic changes (declines in sea ice cover) in the Arctic are propelling growth in marine mobile activities, such as shipping, tourism and fisheries. Ship-based sectors and actors are demanding more accurate and salient Arctic weather and climate predictions, which puts great expectations on our current global and regional forecasting systems. SALIENSEAS aims to understand the mobility patterns, constraints, challenges, decision-making contexts and information needs of end-users in different European Arctic marine sectors; to develop and apply participatory tools for co-producing salient climate services with Arctic marine end-users; and to co-develop user-relevant and sector specific climate services and dissemination systems dedicated to Arctic marine end-users by demonstration of seamless weather-to-climate Arctic climate services tailored to key social, environmental and economic needs. The SALIENSEAS project will bring together a team of social and natural scientists, met-ocean service personnel, and end-users in an iterative research and co-production process. Stakeholders and end-users will be directly involved in the project, both as advisors in the project management and as respondents and participants in end-user workshops. We will adopt cutting edge and partly in-house developed concepts and methodologies for effectively co-producing knowledge and knowledge systems as an overall approach to the project and as part of the work packages.SALIENSEAS has already been endorsed as a key contributing project in the implementation plans of the Year of Polar Prediction, which creates excellent opportunities for extending the approach and communicating the lessons learnt beyond the current European scope of the project.