TThe Polar Climate Space Hackathon took place at the Åh Stifts- och Konferensgård, in Ljungskile, Sweden on 24th – 30th August 2026.
The focus was on both Antarctic and the Arctic and especially the earth system processes that contribute to cryosphere changes, ranging form glaciers to seas and ice in clouds. ECR’s interested in the work in this multidisciplinary group were incited as well as senior scientists proposing projects that ECR’s could work on. An opportunity for a week focused with senior scientists on mentoring, lectures and networking.
The PISCO project climate hackathon groups are presenting their projects. Firstly, the clouds group who are looking at the PolarRES climate simulations and data from ESA.
A collaborative effort with SnowPI and PISCO was presented through the permafrost and frozen ground group, looking at how climate models represent snow depth and soil temperatures.
Next, was the group who have been learning about Machine Learning from scratch and applying it to satellite data and climate models, also part of our ESA, PISCO project looking at Antarctica and surface melt ponds on the ice shelves, part of the OCEAN ICE collaboration!
The Snow group presented on using multiple observational datasets in and around Disko Bay including the new SWOT + Earth Care data from ESA to assess if RCMs can capture Snowfall and snow depth. This is in collaboration with Horizon Europe ICELINK.
The author of the article - Ruth Mottram (Danish Meteorological institute). Information and Image taken from The Polar Climate Space hackathon: save the date and pre-registration