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FORSTERK-Forsterkningsmidler

Enhancing Norwegian involvement in the FORCeS project

Awarded: NOK 1.0 mill.

The primary objective of ENFORCeS was to maximise the benefit to the Norwegian climate research community from the H2020 project FORCeS ("Constrained aerosol forcing for improved climate projections"). This is a large collaborative project with 20 partners across Europe, which aims to tackle one of the big open questions in climate research at present, namely to what extent cooling from aerosol particles have influenced climate change to date, and what the associated implications are for future climate projections. FORCeS is led by Stockholm University and the official start date was October 1 2019. The project will be concluded in March 2023. Norwegian partners are University of Oslo and Met Norway. A secondary objective of ENFORCeS was to increase collaboration across research institutions in Norway related to this research topic, with the hope that this will ultimately strengthen Norway's role as a leader in this field. Further, the goal was to better connect the Norwegian aerosol-cloud-climate research community to related activities and research groups across Europe. For example, the Norwegian Earth System Model NorESM2 is one out of three earth system models that will be used extensively in FORCeS. Increased European collaboration centered around this model is a great advantage for this important Norwegian research infrastructure, and will ensure that the model is used and continuously improved by a growing community going forward. Within ENFORCeS, the above objectives were addressed through seminars, workshops and international mobility.

The ENFORCeS project has been very influential in bringing the Norwegian climate research community together through open weekly seminar series, with an audience that spans several research institutions and an estimated average of 50 participants when in-person and online participants are taken into account. The project also co-funded two international workshop on the topic of aerosol-cloud-climate interactions in Oslo in 2022, with approximately 100 participants each. The workshops exposed the Norwegian research community to the international research frontier on these topics, and allowed several Norwegian researcher to present their research to a large international expert audience.

The H2020 project FORCeS seeks to address one of the long standing challenges in climate research to date, namely to what extent aerosol pollution influences climate, and will through its activities likely influence the field of aerosol-cloud-climate interactions strongly for years to come. Norway has a strong involvement in FORCeS through the participation of University of Oslo (work package leader Prof. Trude Storelvmo), and Met Norway (work package leaders Michael Schulz and Øyvind Seland). However, the Norwegian research community in this field includes several dozens of researchers across multiple institutions, most of whom have no direct involvement in FORCeS, and the goal of ENFORCeS is therefore to make sure these researchers and institutions also benefit from FORCeS. This will be achieved by (i) inviting FORCeS researchers to give seminars in the recently created Joint Oslo Seminar in Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate Science (Prof. Storelvmo initiated this seminar series in 2018 together with researchers at Met Norway, Cicero and NILU), and (ii) by holding the FORCeS annual meeting in 2022 in Oslo, with parts of the meeting open to the entire aerosol-cloud climate research community in Norway.

Funding scheme:

FORSTERK-Forsterkningsmidler

Funding Sources