Expressions of Intent for International Polar Year 2007-2008 Activities

Expression of Interest Details

PROPOSAL INFORMATION

Pan-Arctic Climate Variability Activity for the Past 50 to 150 years  (PACLIVAP-50-150)

Outline
A solid climate variability database, increased knowledge and understanding of climate variability in the Arctic will be crucial for the success of many of IPY-research activities. Nevertheless instrumental climate information is scarce in the region - the number of existing climate datasets sharply decreases with increasing latitude. Although there have been several successful attempts in the past to create high quality long-term climate datasets for different arctic regions, a common and complete recovery and re-analysis of all existing instrumental data sources (focusing on data quality, completeness and homogeneity and supported by regional climate modelling) for the entire IPY-target region has not been undertaken yet. PACLIVAP-50-150 intends to create such a pan-arctic climate variability dataset of the past 50 years in high spatial resolution and - with certain limitations concerning temporal and spatial resolution and coverage - for the past 150 years. This objective shall be reached by a combined attempt of instrumental data recovery, quality improvement, homogenisation and analysis together with regional high resolution climate modelling. The main problem in homogenising (making old instrumental data comparable to the recent state of a site) in the arctic is the great distance to reference stations for relative homogeneity testing and adjusting. PACLIVAP seeks to overcome this problem through the use of a high-resolution simulation for the polar climate for the past 50 years, which will be driven by a coarse-resolution global reanalysis (e.g. ERA40) and by estimates for the sea ice cover. The simulation will not only include information from observations that were assimilated in the reanalysis, but also contain small-scale climatic features that stem from the complex topography, and the distribution of land, sea and ice. As the simulated regional climate contains information from many sources, it can be expected to be more homogeneous than individual records. We will exploit this fact by using the simulation to define reference series for the homogenization of individual records. The simulation will also provide a better physical-dynamical understanding of the regional climate and thus provide a hitherto not available solid basis for the creation of a consistent and high resolution climate database for the past 50 years. The high resolution patterns of the 50 years dataset will then be used for reconstructing the “really scarce-data period” of the 100 years before. The usefulness of this approach has been validated already by the project group in a region with complicated terrain (the European Alps) and a temporally-varying station network. The application to the data-poor early period in the Arctic is one of the challenging new frontiers of the project.

What significant advance(s) in relation to the IPY themes and targets can be anticipated from this project?
Status: A high quality representation of past climate variability in the Arctic is essential for determining the current state of the Arctic climate system. Change: The final datasets will provide the basis for evaluating the rate and magnitude of change, and for validating GCM and RCM high latitude climate simulations. Global Linkages: Will contribute to understanding the global climate system e.g. climate feedbacks associated with atmospheric teleconnection patterns such as AO. New Frontiers: Innovative integration of high resolution climate modelling with instrumental time series quality assessment and analysis. Human Dimension: Providing the necessary physically consistent and spatially continuous input for historic studies of the climate impact on the existence of human societies in the Arctic (“learning from the past”)

What international collaboration is involved in this project?
All circum-arctic national (hydro-met-services of the arctic states) plus leading international climate data holders and projects (UEA-CRU, NOAA-NCDC, NACD, NSIDC, Variability and change in the Canadian Cryosphere,…) have confirmed their active participation. They will work together with leading climate modelling and analysis centres (GKSS-research centre, AWI-Potsdam, Université de Quebec, IARC-Fairbanks,..) in order to increase the quality of data and understanding of regional Arctic climate variability. Please note: the listing is necessarily incomplete due to the lack of space. Not specifically mentioned here are also several cross-checks in the community to avoid parallel EOIs. Thus we became aware of an existing potential to link with some other projects but we found no real look-alikes.

FIELD ACTIVITY DETAILS

Geographical location(s) for the proposed field activities:
There is no fieldwork planned – therefore the following points mainly refer to non material logistics and organisational matters of the project in general. The target area of PACLIVAP is the Arctic as a whole according to the definition of the ICSU-IPY planning group.

Approximate timeframe(s) for proposed field activities:
Arctic: n/a
Antarctic: n/a

Significant facilities will be required for this project:
Mainly personal resources will be required to coordinate the project, carry out model runs, data QC and homogeneity analysis, host workshop, publish results etc. A quick and well managed data access, - transmission, -elaboration, -diffusion system will be established, situated around a common project homepage – with conditional access also for other groups and the general public (compare also 3.3 and 3.4)

Will the project leave a legacy of infrastructure?
The legacy provided by the proposed project will be an enhanced knowledge about the patterns and the physics of Arctic climate variability based on a hitherto not existing database concerning quality, length, spatial resolution and coverage. This is valuable for the scientific community of climate and climate impact research in general and specifically crucial for respective IPY-activities.

How is it envisaged that the required logistic support will be secured?
Consortium
National agency
Own support
Other sources of support

The project will be coordinated by a skilled project organiser (compare 4.0) in collaboration with the key project people indicated from the various data and modelling centres. Money saving personal meetings will be organised at least twice at the occasion of one AMS- and one EGU annual meeting.

Has the project been "endorsed" at a national or international level?
A conditional YES: All participating national met. services, data holders and research institutes have recognized the importance of the proposed project and have agreed to contribute to the project objectives in accordance with the respective plans of their other involvements in IPY. Organisation of official and legal endorsements until June 2005 would be no problem.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND STRUCTURE

Is the project a short-term expansion (over the IPY 2007-2008 timeframe) of an existing plan, programme or initiative or is it a new autonomous proposal?
New

The project is a new activity, but it is deeply embedded into a well established and well cooperating international research community of national weather services, international data centres and climate modelling centres. It follows the general objectives of WMO’s global data and research policy (WCRP, CliC, GCOS, oncoming Polar CGOS?…) but concentrates on the arctic region in a hitherto not given joint effort of instrumental and modelling specialists.

How will the project be organised and managed?
The project will be coordinated by a skilled project organiser (compare 4.0) in collaboration with the key project people indicated from the various data and modelling centres. A steering committee consisting of the project coordinator, 2 data specialists (representing the national and the international data providers) and 1 to 2 modellers will keep the contact to the IPY-JC and the respective funding agencies. Money saving personal meetings of the plenum (all participants) will be organised at least twice at the occasion of one AMS- and one EGU annual meeting.

What are the initial plans of the project for addressing the education, outreach and communication issues outlined in the Framework document?
One of the main deliverables of the project will be the publicly accessible project homepage with a specific sector addressing schoolteachers, students, the interested public and also researchers from other branches not familiar with the lingo of climatologists but potentially dealing with project results.

What are the initial plans of the project to address data management issues (as outlined in the Framework document?
For the day to day routine and as the main integrative element in respect to data exchange a quick and well managed data access, - transmission, -elaboration, -diffusion system will be established, situated around a common project homepage. Legal aspects of data access and distribution will be negotiated before June 2005, aiming at a full data access within the project community and a quick elaboration (step by step during the project duration) of selected project data and results – together with metadata descriptions – in order to support other IPY activities.

How is it proposed to fund the project?
We envisage to propose at least a STREP to EU-FP6-7 plus additional use of INTAS for the Russian participation plus additional national funding

Is there additional information you wish to provide?
It may be strange to learn from our proposal that the potential of instrumental data is not fully exploited yet and needs further QC, homogenising etc – and that there is at all a chance in the Arctic to successfully deal with the problem. Our proposed combined conventional and modelling attempt may – in the eyes of the evaluators – not have the guarantee to be 100% successful (would it then be a “research” project?). But we are convinced that it is innovative and will at least considerably contribute to a quality enhancement and – in any case – to an enhanced knowledge of pan-arctic climate variability patterns based on physically-dynamically consistent model-data-based analysis.

PROPOSER DETAILS

Dr  Reinhard Böhm
Hohe Warte 38
Vienna
A-1190
Austria

Tel: +43 1 36026 2203
Mobile: +43 664 8209730
Fax: +43 1 36026 72
Email:

Other project members and their affiliation