Some views from the flight to here.

🧵Bonus

If you want to learn more about our research goals in this area, see the attached post👇🏼

bsky.app/profile/daan...

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Due to the weather, we did not yet manage to make it to our research area. Hopefully the weather is with us tomorrow!

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Dank Reinier! Inderdaad een droom en nog steeds een beetje onwerkelijk. Ik zal jullie zeker van updates blijven voorzien!

My ‘shift’ in the Antarctic will last about a month, and together with the Italian colleagues I should mainly monitor the pre-conditioning of the area before the melting season. After that, Roberta Pirazzini and Anja Mödl will take over to monitor the melting period itself.

Gathering these measurements will prove invaluable for our understanding of the surface energy budget on an Antarctic Ice Sheet, and in the long run, they can help us improve the representation of the surface energy budget in the polar regions in climate models.

Continuous measurements of the radiation budget and turbulent fluxes, as well as the drone measurements, are hard to conduct in remote environments with extreme weather conditions. Therefore, such data is rare.

The goal of the upcoming research: improve our understanding of the surface energy budget in the Polar regions, and specifically: understand the controlling factors behind the formation of the surface scattering layer, also known as white ice.

- ⁠packing and shipping all our gear and dealing with the paperwork that comes with it.
- ⁠receiving the required safety trainings, as well as certificates for droning, first-aid, and more.

Preparations for this project have been going on for months:
- fitness and medical examinations to make sure we are mentally and physically fit enough to go to the Antarctic.
- ⁠building and testing weather stations.

Our field work is part of the WhiteIce campaign, a POLARIN project run by Roberta Pirazzini. We will build continuously monitoring weather and radiation stations, use drones for RGB, albedo and thermal mapping, and do manual snow-related measurements.

#POLARIN #POLARINAmbassador

Attached in the previous post: ECMWF 850 hPa temperature for next week Tuesday and ECWMF ensemble for 2m temperatures.

The trend is certainly to colder weather, although uncertainty increases again later next week.

The workshop continued on the night train to Rovaniemi🚆. The last days we focused on communication, adaptation, and integration of physical and social sciences into an (Nordic) action framework.

The answer: mitigation. Depending on what we do in the next decades, we can still reduce risks.

If we dramatically reduce GHG emissions, we can slow and decrease the amount of weakening, buy time for adaptation, and potentially still avoid an AMOC collapse.

Consequences of collapse are potentially devastating, with winters in Northern Europe becoming significantly colder.

Other potential effects: more active storm track in NW-Europe, less precipitation & rapid increase in local sea level.

Current systems & infrastructure not ready for such changes.

Lectures on AMOC and consequences of collapse by experts like René van Westen,
@rahmstorf.bsky.social, @swinda.bsky.social, @helmiraisanen.bsky.social.

Main conclusions: AMOC weakening is observed, further weakening virtually certain. Pace of weakening, and if/when AMOC collapses remain uncertain.