Summary
Faced with a changing climate, businesses, policy makers, and local communities need to access reliable weather and climate information to safeguard human health, wellbeing, economic growth, and environmental sustainability. In response to these challenges, the Blue-Action project was set up in 2016. Blue-Action is a H2020 project, funded under the BG10 call (Impact of Arctic changes on the weather and climate of the Northern Hemisphere) which provides fundamental and empirically-grounded, executable science that quantifies and explains the role of a changing Arctic in increasing predictive capability of weather and climate of the Northern Hemisphere. To achieve this Blue-Action takes 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.
Achievements
We have set up concrete plans to:
• Develop new methods to characterise climate conditions where hazardous weather system forms across the Northern Hemisphere and establish their link to Arctic climate change;
• Deliver an improved representation of Arctic warming and its impact on atmosphere and ocean circulation;
• Enable robust and reliable forecasting to deliver better predictions at sub-seasonal to decadal scales;
• Embed scientific developments and improved model capability within international programmes through organisations including Copernicus C3S, WCRP, IPCC (AR6), JPI Climate and WMO (YOPP & PPP);
• Co-design a series of case studies with organisations and industries that rely on accurate weather and climate forecasting, to apply new modelling techniques to cutting-edge climate services;
• Communicate new insights, results, and messages – as well as data, model improvements and storylines – to a community of stakeholders for whom understanding climate change and associated environmental trends and risks is imperative.
Our main results in terms of scientific achievements (publications) can be found here. Our main results in terms of specific reports can be found here.
Impact in international / European cooperation
• Improve capacity to predict the weather and climate of the Northern Hemisphere, and make it possible to better forecast of extreme weather phenomena;
• Improve the capacity to respond to the impact of climatic change on the environment and human activities in the Arctic, both in the short and longer term;
• Improve the capacity of climate models to represent Arctic warming and its impact on regional and global atmospheric and oceanic circulation;
• Improve the uptake of measurements from satellites by making use of new Earth observation assets; Lead to optimised observation systems for various modelling applications;
• Contribute to a robust and reliable forecasting framework that can help meteorological and climate services to deliver better predictions, including at sub-seasonal and seasonal time scales;
• Improve stakeholders’ capacity to adapt to climate change;
• Contribute to better servicing the economic sectors that rely on improved forecasting capacity (e.g. shipping, mining);
• Contribute to the Opens external link in new windowYear of Polar Prediction (YOPP) and Opens external link in new windowIPCC scientific assessments, and to the Opens external link in new windowCopernicus Climate Change (C3S) services;
• Improve the professional skills and competences for those working and being trained to work within this subject area;
• Improving innovation capacity and the integration of new knowledge;
• Strengthening the competitiveness and growth of companies by developing innovations meeting the needs of European and global markets; and, where relevant, by delivering such innovations to the markets.
