Andrew Meijers presented on behalf of OCEAN ICE on Wednesday 12th August at the session led by EPB. Alongside other projects such as PolaRES, POLARIN, SYNCHRONY and the ESA science cluster.
Andrew highlighted the work OCEAN ICE has achieved so far and observations that have been made through the specialised research and models. As well as how we interact with outreach e.g. at the UN Ocean Decade, SCAR and collaborations with policy events such as the EPB led policy event in Brussels in September.
The main takeaway from OCEAN ICE for the policy officer, is that we need sustained observations in the southern ocean. It will require national initiatives from governments and international collaborations to join different domains together.
The second part of this session involved an open discussion with an EU policy officer, involving mechanisms that the EU could use to sustain observations, for the next IPY what level of ambition should the EU aim for. And finally, how should EU ensure exploratory science in Antarctica and Southern Ocean remains funded and valued.
Some further discussions included how the call that funded OCEAN ICE is exploratory as it’s not sustained mechanism for observations, and the overall consensus form other projects as well is that there is no current framework for sustained observations. “The future we deserve to have, requires exploratory science.” - Maria Grigoratou
In addition Andrew Meijers presented some lessons learned from OCEAN ICE at the SYNCHRONY open discussion meeting held in parallel to the SCAR open science conference on Saturday 15th of August. Here he highlighted the importance of planning for the development of observational data product from the start of a project, and stressed the importance of aligning project outputs with the key metrics that end users - particularly policy makers - actually want.
The author of the article - Jessica Richt (British Antarctic Survey) and Andrew Meijers (British Antarctic Survey)
