Tag: climate change

Back at Basen*

LISA is alive! Kind of. We had a really good field test of the system in this, our first week in Antarctica (though thank goodness for satellite wifi connection** to the rest of the world so LISA’s genius creator Helle Kjær could assist in troubleshooting). It was a bit of a struggle and I would say we came out partial winners, with a much deeper understanding of how the box is actually put together and more importantly some really interesting data (yay!) that Clement is busy processing already – I’m very excited to see how it turns out as it will help to direct our following field sorties.

This is the first field deployment of LISA in Antarctica, and even if she didn’t give up all the secrets of the snow, it’s still an achievement worth celebrating that we got half of it, and an interesting half too.

We chose a coring site around 60km from Wasa, so it was a long slow snow-scooter tour up Plogbreen (the plough glacier – named after our neighbouring nunatak Plogen, the plough) and on to the flat plateau of Ritscher Flya at about 1000m elevation.

Wind sculpts snow into ridges called sastrugi. We had quite a bit of fresh snow at this site while we were there. Sometimes it’s hard to work out where the snow surface actually is.

It was a pretty wind and snowy site, in a katabatic wind zone (thankfully not too strong on this trip), which was intentional, as one of the aims of our study is the effects of strong winds on snow accumulation. As preparing to leave took most of the day (especially doing the chemistry mixes for LISA), we headed up in the afternoon and then stayed out overnight in these fantastic little cabins on skis.

Our field camp: sledge full of equipment, the blue cabin on a sledge (an ark) is one of our living quarters and the pyramid shaped, orange Scott tent is our bathroom.

The Polar Research institute in Sweden calls them arks and they are really a very nice solution to the problem of cold and wind and trying to work in quite extreme conditions. Pulled by a snow-scooter and with a stove inside for melting snow and heating, they’re really very cosy to sleep in and it makes a big difference to be able to warm up when for example you’ve been sitting in a snow pit at -15C with a hefty wind chill on top and are covered in spin drift snow (as me how I know).

We were greeted by this beautiful halo around the sun upon waking, with sun dogs on either side, caused by the ice crystals in the sky. In fact we nick-named the site diamond dust because of the clear sky precipitation on the first morning.

We soon got into a good rhythm with Henrik driving the coring, Clement logging and Ninis and myself assisting with the cores.

Starting the first core, (l to r the rest of the field team, Henrik, Clement and Ninis)

And then it was time to get LISA going and a very long and slightly frustrating day followed. Thankfully, by bedtime and having reconstructed quite a lot of the inner tubing of the box, we got LISA ready for work the next day.

The LISA box with melting ice core on top and computer recording the data as it appears. The pop-up fishing tent was essential for working at this site in the cold winds. Without wind chill it was around -10C outside, preventing ice crystals from forming in the chemistry lines and reagents is also a concern, but the arks also simplify things.

I dug a snow pit – always one of my favourite activities, it’s good to get your hands in the snow and really feel what is going on, and we identified some really intriguing layers. Lots more work to be done there to work out what is going on.

As added entertainment, Ninis was interviewed live from the top of the ice sheet by Swedish TV live from the fieldcamp (check out God Morgon Sverige on TV4, 23rd December if you’re interested). However, after 2 nights out it was time to pack up and head back, 3 cores worth of data richer, for a shower, laundry and a Christmas Eve day off.

On Christmas eve daytime it was my turn with a brief 2 minutes to explain our project on Danish TV2 news (at 12.15 CET in case you have an account and would like to see me looking wind swept). Juleaften, Christmas Eve, is the big day of celebration in the Nordic countries, so we took an almost day off, doing some washing, cleaning the living modules and enjoying plenty of good food courtesy of the Swedish chef Raymond who prepared a Christmas dinner feast later, perfect after a long Christmas hike over the nunatak.

Field Photos

Given the current state of the US administration I think it’s worth thinking about what services we use, to become less dependent on US tech and social media companies. Therefore, I’m sharing photos over on pixelfed while we’re out here, in case you want to see more field photos, though sharing is a bit intermittent as it depends on the internet link and due to the expense of the data, we’re trying not to use too much.

I am also posting over on blue sky, though there is much that makes me uneasy about that platform, so I will keep posting on the fediscience server on mastodon too (and indeed the quality of interaction is often better there strangely, given I feel that the platform is smaller than blue sky).

*The Swedish research station Wasa is located on a nunatak in Antarctica called Basen (it’s pronounced Baasen, like the sound a sheep makes in english)

**Yes we are on starlink. It’s incredibly impressive performance wise, but I’d rather not be supporting the nazi man-child, the sooner Eutel Oneweb makes an alternative for users like us, the better, though preferably without this polluting a footprint in low earth orbit. In fact if any EUTEL folks are reading this, I’d be delighted to test out a lightweight system for polar field scientists for you 🙂

Screenshot from satellitemap.space showing the position of the tens of thousands of starlink satellites currently orbiting earth. Check out their visualiser to see other satellites!

Meeting LISA

LISA: the Lightweight In Situ Analysis box is one of a kind; built by our friends at PICE in the Niels Bohr Institute. Later this year we’re taking LISA to Antarctica for the first time ever, to analyse shallow snow and firn cores directly in the field.

This is part of our contribution to the EPIC iQ2300 – a project led by Prof. Arjen Stroeven in Stockholm and organised by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat.

iQ2300 is a huge project, and we are just a small part of it: the aim is to understand Dronning Maud Land’s evolution from the Holocene and out to 2300. Expect to hear a lot more about this effort in coming months…

Map of Antarctica, I lifted from polar.se : LISA will be visiting the Swedish Wasa station in DML – the top bit on this map – with us


Now back to our humble friend.

We hope LISA will help us understand how much snow falls in Dronning Maud Land, how much it varies from year to year and what is the influence of sea ice and far field atmospheric processes on the rate of snowfall. Snowfall is exceptionally difficult to measure and one of our biggest uncertainties in working out Antarctic mass budget and the response of Antarctica to a changing climate (spoiler alert: we might have a paper coming out about this shortly)…

Meet LISA: a view inside the Magic Box..


Although LISA has been used in Greenland before, this is quite an experimental deployment, which means potentially really a lot of valuable scientific results. We would ultimately liek to build an Antarctic specific box, but that will have to wait to see if the results of this deployment are as good as we hope. (And some funding – if you are a billionaire with a spare couple of hundred thousand Euros, we’re always interested in talking).

The box itself is conceptually simple but in practice a little complex with a multiplicity of tubes, connectors and spare parts. This means it’s easy to fix if it breaks down, but also we need to understand how it works first.

Some parts of LISA are quite fiddly…


Today, the awesome and exceptionally generous Associate Professor Helle Kjær took myself, Stockholm Uni Prof Ninis Rosqvist and our PhD colleague from the Novo Nordisk funded PRECISE project, Clément Cherblanc through the use of the box.

Helle showing Clément the workings inside LISA

There’s a lot to remember and a lot to check but we’re reasonably hopeful we’ll get good results. The aim is to understand both the interannual variability on decadal timescales and the spatial gradients in snowfall accumulation. It’s a huge task, so it’s probably fortunate that we have 6 weeks or so (depending on the weather always!) to try and get it deployed at anumber of different sites which will hopefully allow us to do this.

It’s a big change to my normal fieldwork activities, but also a logical extension of them. And highly complementary to the climate and SMB modelling we are developing.

Nonetheless, ithere’s a lot of new stuff and I have in the past weeks learnt a great deal about transporting very small amounts of mildly hazardous chemicals on airlines, how to deal with customs and pack fragile instruments in large boxes.

Much more to come on this project, so stay tuned…

Clement getting stuck into using the software that measures different properties in the cores.

Honorarily Professing

Most people outside of Denmark know about hygge these days, but the term janteloven is less familiar. For British readers the most appropriate translation would be tall poppy syndrome.

Anyway, I’ve hesitated a bit to write this post a bit, but at the same time I am delighted and proud and actually a bit surprised to have been awarded an honorary Professorship at Aarhus University.

As a first generation academic, I didn’t know what a PhD was when I started university, so it feels like a big thing and a bit unreal. My employers at DMI have announced it (with a truly terrible fieldwork photo of me looking very windswept), so it must be true now I guess?!

My very kind and extremely smart former boss at DMI, Professor Peter Langen, now leads the Environmental Science Department at Aarhus University (actually based at Risø near Roskilde and not in Aarhus). He put me and my amazing and very talented colleague Shuting Yang forward to the University for this honour earlier this year and we heard just before the summer break it had been accepted.

It’s a purely honorary position, so I don’t get paid by the University, on the other hand it doesn’t come with any obligations either and it lasts for 5 years. I’m hopeful though that it will lead to new and exciting collaborations and maybe even new studentships and other programmes. I’ve always enjoyed working with students, so if you’re at Aarhus University and looking for a thesis supervisor working on polar climaet and ice sheets, give me a shout.

I already co-supervise one PhD with the Environmental Science department and I’m extremely impressed with the calibre of research there. The universe moving, as it does, in mysterious ways, a few days ago we also got good news about Horizon Europe funding that will also facilitate closer working with AU so watch this space for more on that front.

Now I guess it’s time to start thinking about an inaugural lecture or something and I’m looking forward to exploring the rather beautiful fjordside campus of Risø when I get chance.

The Risø campus of Aarhus University shared with DTU and various other green energy related companies. Picture shamelessly lifted from Risø gateway

PROTECT: The Sea Level Rise Question

There is currently some discussion in the Danish media about sea level rise hazards and the risk of rapid changes that may or may not be on the horizon. Some of the discussion is about IPCC estimates. That’s a little unfortunate and in fact a bit unfair as the IPCC report has not been updated since 2021, nor was it intended to have been. In the mean time there has been a lot of additional science to clear up some of the ambiguities and questions left from the last report.

I’ve been working quite a bit on the cryosphere part of the sea level question of late, so thought I’d share some insights from the latest research into the debate at this point. And I have a pretty specific viewpoint here, because I’ve been working with the datasets, models, climate outputs etc that will likely go into the next IPCC report as part of a couple of EU funded projects. As part of that, we have prepared a policy briefing that will be presented to the European Parliament in June this year, but it’s already online now and will no doubt cross your socials later this week. I’m going to put in some highlights into this post too.

Now, I want to be really clear that everything I say in this post can be backed up with peer reviewed science, most of which has been published in the last 2 to 3 years. Let’s start with the summary:.:

  • The sea is rising. And the rate of rise is currently accelerating.
  • The sea will continue to rise long into the future. The rate of that sea level rise is largely in our society’s hands, given that it is strongly related to greenhouse gas emissions.
  • We have already committed to at least 2m of sea level rise by 2300.
  • By the end of 2100 most small glaciers and ice caps will be gone, mountain glaciers will contribute 20-24% of total sea-level rise under varying emission scenarios.
  • Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet mass loss will contribute significantly to sea-level rise for centuries, even under low emissions scenarios
  • Abrupt sea level rise on the order of metres in a few decades is not credible given new understanding of key ice fracture and iceberg calving processes.
  • By the end of this century we expect on the order of a half to one metre of sea level rise around Denmark, depending on emissions pathway. (If you want to get really specific: the low-likelihood high impact sea level rise scenario corresponds to about 0.9 m (on average), or at the 83rd percentile, about 1.6 m of sea level rise).
  • Your local sea level rise is not the same as the global average and some areas, primarily those at lower latitudes will experience higher total sea level rise and earlier than in regions at higher latitudes.
  • We have created a local sea level rise tool. You should still check your local coastal services provider, they will certainly have something tailor made for your local coastline (or they *should*!), but for something more updated than the IPCC, with latest SLR data, this is the one to check.

Sea level rise now is ~5mm per year averaged over the last 5 years, 10 years ago it was about 3 mm per year). Much of that sea level rise comes from melting ice, particularly the small glaciers and ice caps that are melting very fast indeed right now. Even under lower levels of emissions, those losses will increase. There won’t be many left by the end of this century.

Greenland is the largest single contributor and adds just less than a millimetre of sea level rise per year, with Antarctica contributing around a third of Greenland, primarily from the Amundsen Sea sector. The remaining sea level rise comes from thermal expansion of the oceans. Our work shows very clearly that the emissions pathway we follow as a human society will determine the ultimate sea level rise, but also how fast that will be achieved. The less we burn, the lower and slower the rise. But even under a low-end Paris scenario, we expect around 1 metre of sea level by 2300.

The long tail of sea level rise will come from Antarctica, where the ocean is accelerating melt of, in particular, West Antarctica. However, our recent work and that of other ice sheet groups shows that the risk of multi-metre sea level rise within a few decades is unrealistic. Again, to be very clear: We can’t rule out multiple metres of sea level rise, but it will happen on a timescale of centuries rather than years. High emissions pathways make multiple metres of sea level rise more likely. In fact, our results show that even under low emissions pathways, we may still be committed to losing some parts of especially West Antarctica, but it will still take a long-time for the Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate. We have time to prepare our coastlines.

Greenland is losing ice much faster than Antarctica, and here atmospheric processes and firn and snow are more important than the ocean and these are also where the læarge uncertainties are. As I’ve written about before, that protective layer of compressed snow and ice will determine how quickly Greenland melts, as it is lost, the ice sheet will accelerate it’s contribution to sea level. This is a process that is included in our estimates.

There’s so much more I could write, but that’s supposed to be the high level summary. Feel free to shoot me questions in the comment feeds. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Five years ago, a small group of European scientists got together to do something really ambitious: work out how quickly and how far the sea will rise, both locally and on average worldwide, from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. The PROTECT project was the first EU funded project in 10 years to really grapple with the state-of-the-art in ice sheet and glacier melt and the implications for sea level rise and to really seek to understand what is the problem, what are the uncertainties, what can we do about it.

We were and are a group of climate scientists, glaciologists, remote sensors, ice sheet modellers, atmospheric and ocean physicists, professors, statisticians, students, coastal adaptation specialists, social scientists and geodesists, stakeholders and policymakers. We’ve produced more than 155 scientific papers in the last 5 years (with more on the way) and now our findings are summarised in our new policy briefing for the European Parliament.

It’s been a formative, exhilarating and occasionally tough experience doing big science in the Horizon 2020 framework, but we’ve genuinely made some big steps forward, including new estimates of rates of ice sheet and glacier loss, a better understanding of some key processes, particularly calving and the influence of the ocean on the loss of ice shelves. More importantly for human societies, by integrating the social scientists into the project, we have had a very clear focus on how to consider sea level rise, not just as a scientific ice sheet process problem, but also how to integrate the findings into usable and workable information. In Denmark, we will start to use these inputs already in updating the Danish Climate Atlas. If you are elsewhere in the world, you may want to check out our sea level rise tool, that shows how the emissions pathway we follow, will affect your local sea level rise.

Our final recommendations?

  1. Accelerate emission reductions to follow the lower emission scenario to limit
    cryosphere loss and associated sea-level rise
  2. Enhance monitoring of glaciers and ice sheets to refine models and predictions
  3. Support the long-term development of ice sheet models, their integration into
    climate models, and the coupling of glacier models with hydrological models, while
    promoting education and training to build expertise in these areas
  4. Invest in flexible and localized coastal management that incorporates
    uncertainty and long-term projections
  5. Foster international collaboration to share knowledge, resources, and strategies
    for mitigating and adapting to global impacts

Looking backwards…

This is the first in a two-parter. At this time of year, posts making bold statements about what happened last year and what we plan to do this year start to become prominent. The last few years I have spent a few hours in the first week of January reviewing what worked, what was fun and what was cool, what was awful and what definitely was a waste of time. I’m not honestly sure that any of this is of interest to anyone except me, so read on, but you have been warned..

2024: Themes of this year: Greenland, Machine Learning, people, and big data…

I visited the world’s largest island 3 times this year – a rather unprecedented number of times for me, with fieldwork in April (it was very cold and there was a lot of snow) to continue a soon to be submitted for publication set of observations in the melange zone and then to establish a new snow observation site.

View from Qaanaaq at evening in early April 2024.

In late May and early June, after a slightly longer than expected stop in Ilulissat, we made it to bring in the instruments before the sea ice break-up and happily my new snow observations seem to be working. Now I just need to do set-up the data processing chain, which will be 2025’s paying myself first.

Working with scientists from the Greenland natural resources institute and local hunters on the sea ice.

The final trip was in October for a workshop with scientists in Greenland about climate change impacts in Greenland, the subpolar gyre and AMOC for the UN Ocean decade. It was a memorable meeting for the sheer range and quality of science presented as well as for being stranded in Nuuk by a broken aeroplane in quite ridiculously beautiful weather (I mostly stayed in my hotel room to write the aforementioned paper, sadly. In 2025 I will work on my priorities) .

Apart from fieldwork I have really tried hard on publications this year. I have (like many scientists I suspect), far more data sitting around on hard drives than I have published. It’s a waste and it’s also fun to work on actual data instead of endless emails. This is something I intend to continue focusing on the next few years as well. There is gold in them thar computers…

We had a couple of writing retreats were very successful. These I plan to continue also and the PRECISE project grant is happily flexible enough to do this. I probably achieve as much in terms of data processing and paper writing in 3 focused days as I would in 3 months in the office. It paid off too. I managed to co-author 8 papers published this year (including my first 1st-author paper in ages – a workshop report, but nevertheless it counts.). Some of these are still preprints, so will change, and there are a couple more that have been submitted but are not yet available as preprints. I will submit two more papers in the next 3 weeks as well (1 first author), so January 2025 is going to be the 13th month of 2024 in my mind.

Bootcamps have been a theme the last 3 years, I organised the first in 2022 and so far there have been 4 publications from that first effort. There was another this year in June, ( I have attended them in 2023 and 2024 but was not organising) where we really got going on a project for ESA that I have had my eye on for a while – I hope the publication from that will be ready in the Spring this coming year.

Machine Learning: This was the year I really got machine learning. I’ve been following a graduate course online, and learning from my colleagues and students about implementations. I understand a lot more about the architecture and how to in practice apply neural networks and other techniques like random forests now. This is not before time, as we intend to implement these to contribute to CMIP7 and the next IPCC report. We still have a lot of work to do, but the foundation is laid. And it’s been fun to learn something that, if not exactly new, is a new application of something. In fact the biggest barrier has really been learning new terminology. We have also been fortunate that Eumetsat and the ECMWF have been very helpful in providing us with ML-optimised computer resources to test much of these new models out on. We’re actually running out of resources a bit though, so it’s time to start investigating Lumi, Leonardo and the new Danish centre Gefion to see what we can get out of these.

People: This year our research group has grown with another 2 PhD students, and at the end of the year we also employed a new post-doc. I think it’s large enough now. I’m very aware that if I don’t do my job properly, then not only the research but the people will suffer, so developing people management skills is really important. In any case it’s extremely stimulating to work with such talented young people and I’m really excited to see where the science will take us, given the skills in the team. I hope I have been good enough at managing such a large and young team, but I have my doubts. A focus for 2025 for sure.

Data: This has been the year of big data, not necessarily just for ML purposes but also in the PolarRES project the production and management of an enormous set of future climate projections at very high resolution. More on this anon. Suffice to say, it has taken a lot of my time and mental energy and it’s probably not the most exciting thing to talk about, but we now have 800 Tb of climate simulation data to dig into. I suspect that rewards of this will be coming for years. There has also been a lot of digging into satellite datasets and the bringing together of the two has been very rewarding already. It’s a rich seam, to continue the metaphor, that will be producing scientific gold for many years.

Projects: we have gone in the final year of two projects, PROTECT and PolarRES, both of which will finally end in 2025. We also arrived at the half way point of OCEAN:ICE. So rather than being a year of starts, it has been a year where we have started to prepare for endings – actually this is a fun part of many projects where a lot of the grunt work is out the way and we can start to see what we have actually found out. It can also be a slog of confusing data, writing and editing papers and dealing with h co-author comments. I’ve definitely been in that process this year, hopefully with some of the outputs to come next year…

Proposals: I started 2024 writing a proposal. Colleagues were in 3 different consortia for the same call, alas ours didn’t get funded, but 2 of the others did and will start this year. That is a good result for DMI and our group. I wrote another proposal in the Autumn and contributed to a 4th and finally at the end of the year I heard that both will *likely* be funded (but are currently embargoed and in negotiation, so no more will be said now). It sometimes feels that spending so much time and energy on proposal writing is putting the cart before the horse, but in fact I find proposal writing something akin to brainstorming. It’s essential of course to ensure we can continue to do the science we want, but it can also help us to clarify our ideas and make sure we’re not on the wrong track. It’s also a good way to keep track of what the funders are actually wanting to know and to help us focus on policy relevance.

There was also an incredible number of meetings, reports, milestones and deliverables, but you probably don’t want to hear about that…

Also missing from this summary is personal life, and, well that is not for sharing publically, but suffice to say, I learnt about raising teenagers, I also had some very good times with friends and family, to all of whom I immensely grateful for being a part of my voyages around the sun.

Anyway, reading all that back, I’m not surprised I ended the year exhausted! I am not planning on quite such a slog in future. I should probably pace myself a bit more this year, the plans for which will be the subject of next week’s post.

Paying yourself first..

The personal finance community have an important concept of “paying yourself first”*, by which they mean, that when your salary or other form of payment comes in, the first thing you should do is put a given percentage, 10% is commonly used, into a savings account. Only then should you consider spending the rest of your income.

I kind of like this as a concept, and I think it could very usefully be applied to other areas of my life, notably, which is where of course it comes into this blog, science. As I’ve got more senior I’ve found I’m spending more and more time on managerial tasks, meetings, emails, reports, proposals, supervision and less and less on actual science. This is probably fine, it’s the way of the world, but it’s also a pity when part of (most of?) the joy of science is really in the doing. That’s why we put up with paltry wages, high workloads, social media hostility and the rest.

Actually doing science is so much fun.

Admittedly, some of it is more type 2 fun (best enjoyed retrospectively, as anyone who has spent a month CMORising model output or digging snow pits in freezing driving snow conditions can tell you), than type 1 fun (enjoyed in the moment). Nonetheless, I occasionally feel I’m in danger of losing the thread of why I started in this career in the first place.

Type 2 fun: It took us 4 hours to locate and dig that lot out in wind and occasional blizzard conditions.

Autumn was absolutely and ridiculously hectic, many project meetings, as well as technical conferences and symposia, proposal deadlines, deliverable deadlines and one-off workshops. I welcome November with open arms. Finally time to do some actual work again! And in the way of paying myself forward, I have started two different but related tracks to get back into the groove this month.

The first, you can already see some entries for here on a dedicated page. The idea is a new map, according to the prompts from the website 30DayMapChallenge , every day. I’m certainly not going to make all 30. I will be doing well if I manage 10, but already after only 2 days, I can feel my geospatial mojo coming back. There’s nothing like practicing your GIS skills to make you want to do more of them

The second is , academic writing month. I have 3 papers I’d really like to submit before the end of this year. I’m very close with one, fairly close with the second and to be entirely honest I’m not really sure where I am with the third… Now it may seem unwise to commit to 2 daily activities in November, while recovering from September and October, but in fact they’re pretty complementary. I plan to post maps that are relevant to, or even actually from the papers, and just the process of looking at data is a motivation to get the work done.

So my commitment to is:

  1. I will have the first 2 papers submitted by end November
  2. I will write at least 20 minutes per day – every day!
  3. I will write at least 8 hours per week
  4. I will rediscover the joy of science.

Let’s call it paying myself first…

*Far be it from me to offer financial advice, but if I was a young graduate student, I’d be saving up pretty hard on whatever meagre wages I have. The research field can be fickle with contracts, even permanent jobs have to continue raising money and we can’t keep up the pace for ever. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t swap it for another job…

A Climate Atlas is discovered..

This post is in response to a thread posted on blue sky* by Jeremy Bassis and a discussion between Felicity mcCormack and Gavin Schmidt. All these people are well-respected climate scientists and the original thread was posted as a result of a Nature piece about operationalising climate models (and sea level rise), like we forecast the weather. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while too, as sea level rise is an undeniable existential threat to my home country…

Anyway, I replied with a link to the Danish Climate Atlas – which to my mind is very much a model for how climate information should be done. I can’t give a full overview of the Climate Atlas, largely because it’s not my story to tell, but as Jeremy asked me to talk more in depth about it, and given the 300 character limit, I thought I’d formulate a few thoughts here first before sharing…

The climate atlas is not a book but a web frontpage that allows anyone with an internet connection to get high quality climate information at a local scale in Denmark. The map interface makes it easy and intuitive to use, and for detail a whole bunch of reports and datasets in different formats can be downloaded (everything from ASCII to GIS to netcdf). You can explore it here. All the data is given on a kommune (local authority) level except for sea level rise data which is divided up by coastal stretches.

Example of a Climate atlas figure – this is the overview figure, each local authority area is clickable for local information

For audiences that just want a quick message there are these easy to interpret icons with a key message below, like this one about higher water levels.

I was involved in the early stages and to my mind there are 4 crucial elements that have made it very successful:

  1. Legal Requirement: Every local authority (a kommune, don’t think hippies, think regional councils) in Denmark has a legal obligation to make climate adaptation plans and to keep them updated. This element is important as it created awareness of the problem and effects of climate change and the necessity of investigating adaptation options. The initial plans were rather patchy and not very consistent with each other. Many regions had employed a consultant who was also maybe not an expert. Several kommune ended up with data based on CMIP resolution data! Hardly appropriate for a small local region in Denmark (which is barely resolved in most global climate models).
  2. Data Foundation: At the same time we have been dynamically downscaling these simulations for decades, to provide really high quality locally bias corrected data (using also DMI’s long climatological time series to understand if and where biases exist). Colleagues at DMI identified a need to provide this in an easy to use format to everyone in the country. We had long ago discovered that working with motivated kommune employees led to a really good outcome: readable climate variables that are meaningful to an individual city, data formats that can be used by non-scienists (who definitely can’t deal with netCDFs).
  3. Funding: Doing a data project properly requires money. The Climate Atlas is, compared to the cost of not doing anything, extremely cheap, nonetheless, it still costs something. Ear marked funding from the danish state to build up the Climate Atlas from the ground, to develop it as new needs are identified and to improve both communication and presentation has been crucial. Along the way several different needs have arisen (droughts, deep uncertainty in sea level rise), a new version will hopefully be coming soon.
  4. Intense engagement: Probably the most crucial aspect to getting the climate atlas off the ground and into use has been communication over and over and over again. Not just initially with kommune to find out what they need (building on many years of background experience first), but also reaching out to special interest groups raning from local farmers in mid-west Jylland to sewage engineers, high school teachers and property developers. This continues, but has undeniably been helped by Denmark’s open trusting society and generous tradition of cultural meetings, continuing education and festivals.

The climate atlas in Denmark is the example I know best, we should be rightly proud of the team that constructed, maintain and continue to develop it. Other countries certainly have similar products in the Nordic and Blatic countries, and likely elsewhere, a network meets annually within the region to discuss developments etc. After a coincidental meeting, DMI was also invited to help develop one for Ghana, which is ongoing, and of course, will have completely different needs and requirements, However, the decision early one to base the back end of the Climate Atlas on open tools: python, cdo, github and CORDEX simulations, makes a lot of the learnings transferable.

If you want to know more, contact my colleagues at the Klima Atlas! I’m happy to put you in touch..

*As an aside, it’s interesting how many of the climate science and policy community have moved over to Blue Sky. It was rather quiet for a while but activity seems to have picked up. I’m not abandoning mastodon, which I actually prefer, but I’m happy to see an alternative to what has become known as Birdchan. I’d urge you to try it if you’re interested in a social media presence in a slightly more appealing environment. There are a number of handy tools, including fedica, that allow you to crosspost to multiple channels at the same time (including X, mastodon, bsky, TikTok and threads) and I’m also using the OpenVibe app, which has a common timeline from multiple platforms.

Breaking up is hard to do…

Way back in the mists of time, that is, early April, I and colleagues deployed some instruments on the sea ice in front of a number of glaciers in Northern Greenland, which I wrote a little bit about here.

Trusted global GPS tracker buoy
Open met buoy

Since then I’ve mostly been letting them get on with reporting their data back and occasionally checking on the satellite imagery to see how it’s looking in their surroundings.

It was about -30C and very cold when I left them out, so it’s sometimes quite hard to visualise just how much things will change over only a few months and to remember that at some point, they’ll need collecting

After a fairly melty start (yes, that is actually a technical term) to July, particularly in the northern part of the ice sheet (which you can see on the polarportal, see also below right) it’s time to start anticipating their collection.

We have a lot of advantages when it comes to coordinating this kind of project now, compared to the bad old days when imagery and communication were both scarce and expensive

For starters, there is Sentinel Hub’s EO browser, a course in which should be a requirement for every earth science adjacent subject in my opinion. EO Browser produces superb pre-processed imagery for free, such as this one, from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite yesterday

As you can see, the sea ice is still there but fracturing and patches of open water (in blue green) are now becoming visible.

Sentinel 2 satellite image processed on EO browser showing sea ice and ice bergs in front of Tracy and Farquhar glaciers.

If you’re out and about and only have your phone, there is also the excellent snapplanet.io app on your smartphone, with which you can create instagram ready snapshots of the planet or even animated gifs, with high resolution imagery a link away…

Now that’s what I call a fun social media* application…

Animated gif of satellite images showing the front of Heilprin glacier with icebergs and landfast sea ice.

Anyway, back to the break up. Every year, the sea ice forms in the fjord from October/November onwards, by December it’s often thick enough to travel on and then from April it starts to thin and melt and by late June large cracks are starting to form, allowing the surface meltwater to drain through. For a look at what happens if you get a large amount of melt from, say, a foehn wind, before the cracks start to open up, see this iconic photo taken by my colleague Steffen Olsen in 2019.

An extremely rare event, that nevertheless went viral

The other advantage we have working in this fjord is our collaboration with the local hunters and fishers. In winter they use dog sleds for hunting and accessing fishing sites, and to take us and our equipment out on to the ice. In summer, they are primarily using boats for fishing, hunting narwhal and, hopefully, collecting our equipment! Our brilliant DMI colleague Aksel who lives and works in the local settlement is also a huge help in assisting with communication and generally being able to get hold of things and people when asked.

Winter travel

We offer a reward for each buoy that is found and brought back to our base in Qaanaaq, so many of them in fact make their own way home. But we also work with our friends on a kind of remote treasure hunt, challenge Anneka style, with someone at home watching their positions come in via the satellite transmissions and sending updated information via sms to an iridium phone to the hunters on the boat…

I’m told it’s tremendous fun, with sharp eyes required, as even a bright orange plastic globe can be challenging to spot.

A floating trusted buoy in 2022.

I’ve never participated in this treasure hunt myself sadly, on land we generally see something like a spaghetti of arrows and spots via the Trusted global web api:

GPS positions from a trusted buoy.

We then have to try and superimpose these movements on the latest satellite images to work out if the buoy is floating or not, and then check to see if there is sufficient open water for a collection. Naturally working with local knowledge for this part is also absolutely vital.

One of our buoys is found…

The latest satellite images look like the ice has already broken up into large flakes close to Qaanaaq. I’ve annotated the Sentinel-1 image below as it is from a radar satellite that can see through clouds and the images can be a bit confusing if you’re not used to looking at them.

The scale of the massive melt on the ice sheet from the last few days is clearly visible in the dark grey rim on the glaciers. The open sea water is black and the sea ice shows up as geometric greys. This one is downloaded from the automatic archive my colleagues at DMI maintain around the whole coast of Greenland. It can be a handy quick check too.

Annotated satellite image of Kangerlussuaq/Inglefield Bredning (Gulf of Inglefield) fjord. The orange box shows where our study glaciers are located.

So, although the ice is starting to break up it’s at the tricky stage where it’s far from navigable by dog sled and certainly too difficult for boats, so it’s not quite the time to send out hunting parties for GNSS buoys.

It also means that when I go on holiday next week, I will not be quite leaving all this behind. I and my colleague in this project will be monitoring the movements of the buoys and the satellite pictures, as well as relying on our friends in the local community to let us know how the ice is looking and if they can get out to rescue our brave little sensors.

In the mean time I have plenty of data to start analysing and writing up. As ever massive thanks to the people of Qaanaaq and my cool colleagues for putting up with me and our GPS buoys. We hope to submit our first paper pretty soon..

Hopefully I’ll soon be able to look at a map like this one to see where they are (note that the precision on these buoy positions isn’t great, probabaly because they were thenbeing stored in a metal container).

*Yes, I’m probably a nerd. I’m a lot of fun** at parties too though.

**For a given value of “fun”.

Icebergs of Ilulissat

Icebergs in Ilulissat drift around the bay, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes they don’t move at all. They are drenched in the beautiful but sometimes stark light of the polar day. It’s scientifically interesting to watch them and speculate on their past trajectory and their likely future. It’s also extremely beautiful.

I’m once more on my way north to Qaanaaq, but this time I’ve been lucky enough to be able to enjoy some days off in Ilulissat. It’s an astonishing beautiful place, famous for the icebergs that come pouring out of the Ilulissat ice fjord just round the corner.

Normally, we’re only in town for one night as we have to switch planes to get to our field sites and this requires an overnight stay so it has been brilliant to be able to use a little holiday here.

Panorama over the bay in Ilulissat on a sunny evening

I have been using the time to work on some papers and try to clear some of the back log of reports and emails, but there has at least been some time for a couple of hikes in the back country nearby. I could post several hundred photos of icebergs and other magnificent views, but I was struck by the movement of icebergs in the bay outside my window while I was working yesterday.

Sometimes the big bergs seemed to move more, sometimes they seem stuck. I wanted to check this so I set up a time lapse on my tablet in the window of the guest house I’m staying in overnight (bearing in mind it’s the Polar Day so doesn’t actually get dark). I think it actually ran out of power before covering the full six hours I set it up for, so I’m now trying a full day. However, it was enough to show my perception was basically right and I have come to the conclusion the changing movement is related to the tides.

You can see the full almost a minute long film at my peertube account below.

This is also a bit of an excuse to play around with video editing a little, in this case I’m trying out canva, and to advertise my peertube account @icesheets_climate on TILvids.com.

As I’ve alluded to before, I’m trying out the non-corporate social media fediverse and it’s actually quite fun, though the videos are a bit time-consuming so I’m not quite sure how regularly I will manage to post these on my channel, but the clue is in the name on what most of them are about I guess…

Another iceberg near Ilulissat, this time one we visited by boat…

But I have gratuitously many photos on my pixelfed account and no doubt more to come. I’m also planning some icebreaker shorts describing different elements of the environment that I’m working on. We’ll have to see how much time I have to actually get those finished, they typically take a while!

Of course, these are not just pretty pictures – I have a professional interest in icebergs – my PhD was about ice fracture and applying models of crevasse formation to describe a new parameterisation of calving. One of the projects I’m working on in northern Greenland, (funded by the danish state through the National Centre for Climate Research, NCKF) is also focused on calving processes, and specifically the role of ice melange in the system. In fact, one of the papers I’ve been working on this week analyses those iceberg related datasets. It’s immensely valuable and rare that I have the opportunity to be able to focus on the process in the field at the same time as writing the paper.

I have 2 more days in Ilulissat, so no doubt there will be more walks around town and more iceberg photos, but I have sent the iceberg paper back to my co-authors now, so it’s time to focus on a new paper – and the climate of the polar regions in the future.

The Greenland ice sheet

Local sea level rise: A question of gravity

I’ve explained several times in the course of media comments that, when it comes to the sea level rise that you experience, it really matters where the water comes from. This point still seems to cause confusion so I’ve written a super fast post on it.

Waves from the Storm Surge that hit Denmark in October 2023 credit: Sebastian Pelt

We very often talk about a metre or two of sea level rise by the end of the century, but in general that refers to global average sea level. And much like a global mean temperature rise doesn’t tell you very much about the kind of temperature changes you will experience in your location due to weather or climate, global mean sea level is also not very informative when talking about preparing your local community for sea level rise. There are other local factors that are important, (see below), but here I’m going to mostly focus on gravity.

Imagine that sea level is more or less stable around the earth (which it was, more or less, before the start of the twentieth century). Just like the moon causes tides because its gravity exerts a pull on the oceans, the ice sheets are large masses and their gravity also attracts ocean water, so the average sea level is higher closer to Greenland and to Antarctica. But there is only a finite volume of water in the oceans, so a higher sea level close to the ice sheets means lower sea levels further away in the tropics for example.

As the ice sheet melts and gets smaller, its gravitational pull becomes smaller so the average height of the sea around Greenland and Antarctica is lower than it was before, but the water gets redistributed around the earth until it is in equilibrium with the gravitational pull of the ice sheets again. The sea level in other places is therefore much higher than it would have been without that gravitational effect.

And in general, the further away from an ice mass you are, the more these gravitational processes affect your local sea level change. In Northern Europe, it often surprises people (also here in Denmark) to learn that while Greenland has a small influence on our local sea level, it’s not very much because we live relatively close to it, however the loss of ice from Antarctica is much more important in affecting our local sea level rise.

Currently, most of the ice contributing to sea level is from the small glaciers around the world, and here too there is an effect. The melt of Alaska and the Andes are more important to our sea level than the Alps or Norwegian glaciers because we are far from the American glaciers but close to the European ones.

This figure below illustrates the processes:

Processes important for local sea level include changes in land height as ice melts but also the redistribution of water as the gravitational attraction of the ice sheets is reduced. The schematic representation is from the Arctic assessment SWIPA report Figure 9.1 from SWIPA 2017

This is partly why the EU funded PROTECT project on cryosphere contributions to sea level rise, which I am currently working on, has an emphasis on the science to policymakers pipeline. We describe the whole project in this Frontiers paper, which includes a graphic explaining what affects your local sea level.

As you can see, it very much depends on what time and spatial scale you’re looking at, with the two ice sheets affecting sea level on the longest time scales.

Figure 1 from Durand et al., 2021 Illustration of the processes that contribute to sea level change with respect to their temporal and spatial scales. These cover local and short term effects like storm surges, waves and tides to global and long-term changes due to the melting of ice sheets.

In the course of the project some of the partners have produced this excellent policy briefing, which should really be compulsory for anyone interested in coastal developments over the next decades to centuries. The most important points are worth highlighting here:

We expect that 2m of global mean sea level rise is more or less baked in, it will be very difficult to avoid this, even with dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But the timescale, as in when that figure will be reached, could be anything from the next hundred years to the next thousand.

Figure from PROTECT policy briefing showing how the time when average global sea level reaches 2m is strongly dependend on emissions pathway – but also that different parts of the world will reach 2m of sea level rise at very different times, with the tropics and low latitudes in general getting there first.

What the map shows is that the timing at which any individual place on earth reaches 2 m is strongly dependent on where on earth it is. In general lower latitudes close to the equator will get to 2m before higher latitudes, and while there are ocean circulation and other processes that are important here – to a large extent your local sea level is controlled by how close to the ice sheets you are and how quickly those ice sheets will lose their ice.

There are other processes that are important – especially locally, including how much the land you are on is rising or sinking, as well as changes in ocean and atmosphere circulation. I may write about these a bit more later.

Feel free to comment or ask questions in the comments below or you can catch me on mastodon: