BLUE-ACTION - EU Polar Cluster

The overall objective of Blue-Action was to actively improve our ability to describe, model, and predict Arctic climate change and its impact on Northern Hemisphere climate, weather and their extremes, and to deliver valued climate services of societal benefit. In its 5 years of activities (2016-2021), Blue-Action has provided fundamental and empirically-grounded, executable science that can quantify and explain the role of a changing Arctic in increasing the predictive capability of weather and climate of the Northern Hemisphere.

To achieve this objective, Blue-Action has taken a transdisciplinary approach, bridging scientific understanding within Arctic climate, weather and risk management research with key stakeholder knowledge of the impacts of climatic weather extremes and hazardous events, leading to the co-design of better services. This bridge has built on innovative statistical and dynamical approaches to predict weather and climate extremes. In a co-design and co-creation dialogue with users, Blue-Action has taken stock in existing knowledge about cross-sectoral impacts and vulnerabilities with respect to the occurrence of these events and their prediction. Modelling and prediction capabilities have been enhanced by targeting firstly, lower latitude oceanic and atmospheric drivers of regional Arctic changes and secondly, Arctic impacts on Northern Hemisphere climate and weather extremes. Coordinated multi-model experiments have been key to test new higher resolution model configurations, innovative methods to reduce forecast error, and advanced methods to improve uptake of new Earth observations’ assets have been developed and implemented.

Blue-Action has demonstrated how such an uptake may assist in creating a better optimized observation system for various modelling applications. The improved robust and reliable forecasting can help meteorological and climate services to better deliver tailored predictions and advice, including sub-seasonal to seasonal time scales, and take Arctic climate prediction beyond seasons and to teleconnections over the Northern Hemisphere. Through its concerted efforts, Blue-Action has contributed to the improvement of climate models to represent Arctic warming realistically and addressed its impact on regional and global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. More in details, the achieved results of the project have been the following: https://blue-action.eu/about/project-description.

On OpenAIRE and Zenodo the list of Blue-Action contributions in terms of papers, talks, posters is growing, with more than 400 records in open access. You can access them here: https://tinyurl.com/ed7th2nt

Our dissemination activities have not been closed finalised yet. A number of activities will be continued in the next months:

We held our final meeting, a thematic workshop on Multi-annual to Decadal Climate Predictability in the North Atlantic-Arctic Sector in September 2021: the proceedings with links to posters and presentations can be downloaded from Zenodo https://zenodo.org/record/5793263#.YeGKW_6ZOHs ( so far we have 518 views and 379 downloads of this document!)

On 13 October 2021, the Horizon Magazine portrayed the results of Blue-Action and APPLICATE in a feature dedicated to the “Focal point for climate change is at the top of our world, and agenda” written by Sandrine Ceurstemont, linking the work of the projects to the newly launched EU Arctic Strategy and the Horizon Europe mission on “Adaptation to Climate Change”. Link: https://t.co/dMyK5svqqb?amp=1

The Ocean ARTIC collaboration between scientists and artists continues beyond Blue-Action, with published work by the musician Michael Begg, who turned climate data into music https://michaelbegg.studio/artic/ and the environmental artist Eve Mosher, who focuses instead on developing a multi-sensory experience that shares the climate change stories (lived experiences) of marine researchers and coastal communities while conveying a sense of the opportunities and capacity that the general public has to take meaningful action for ocean and planetary health https://www.evemosher.com/ocean-artic
The series of the Climate Coffees continues with the support of the European Climate Research Alliance (ECRA): the updated schedule of events can be found here http://ecra-climate.eu/13-publications/218-climatecoffee these are regular peer-to-peer science exchange events focusing on climate research and results, held in an informal context to foster the collaboration, exchange and uptake of the latest scientific results in the community.
In November 2021, Blue-Action teamed up with Marine Science Scotland and Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature, an international community funded by Copernicus/EUMETSAT, to organise a 1 hour workshop at COP26 on “Ocean Connections from the Arctic across the globe”. The streaming page with the video recording is available here: https://youtu.be/fJ31QC4uIcw The video has been viewed 3,202 times.