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PolarRES Participation at EGU24

3 May 2024

The annual European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2024, held in Vienna, Austria, provides an excellent platform for researchers, professionals, and enthusiasts to disseminate their findings, exchange ideas and stay up to date with the latest research and technological developments in the field of geosciences.

PolarRES had a strong presence at EGU 2024, with multiple researchers delivering presentations and showcasing posters at the General Assembly. Learn more in detail about the different sessions, presentations and posters below:

Session CL2.3 ‘High impact climate events and storylines: from physical understanding to impacts and solutions‘. In order to increase preparedness for high impact climate events, it is important to develop methods and models that are able to represent these events and their impacts, and to better understand how to reduce the risks. To provide more actionable information for risk assessments, climate storylines have become a popular approach to complement probabilistic event attribution and climate projection. This session aimed to bring together the latest research on modelling, understanding, development of storylines and managing plausible past and future climate outcomes, extreme and low-probability events, and their impacts.

  • The session included a presentation by PolarRES researchers Xavier Levine and Priscilla Mooney (NORCE) titled ‘Empirical storylines of climate change using clustering analysis‘ about an alternative methodology for generating climate change storylines, which now often are derived through multivariate linear regression (MLR) analysis. MLR relies on known climatic interactions represented by predictor indices to generate these storylines for specific variables, regions, and seasons. However, a systematic approach for selecting predictor indices is lacking, limiting the generalizability of these storylines. To address this, clustering analysis is proposed as an alternative method to provide possible climate realizations from model projections.

Xavier Levine giving a presentation at EGU 2024 about creating storylines using clustering analysis

Session CR7.7 ‘Atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions in the polar climate system‘ was convened by Priscilla Mooney (NORCE) and covered the importance of these interactions in shaping the polar climates. Closing knowledge gaps on the interactions will improve climate modelling and increase confidence in projections of future climate change in the Polar Regions. As the topics discussed in this session and the research objectives of PolarRES align, this session served as a productive collaborative platform for our researchers.

  • The presentation by Kristiina Verro (Utrecht University), Cecilia Äijälä (University of Helsinki) and Petteri Uotila (FMI) titled: ‘How well do the regional atmospheric, oceanic and coupled models describe the Antarctic sea ice albedo?‘ covered the importance of realistic representation of Antarctic sea ice surface albedo, particularly during melting periods, for accurate atmospheric and oceanic model predictions. Antarctic sea ice serves as a barrier between the atmosphere and ocean and influences solar radiation reflection. The study used regional atmospheric (HCLIM-AROME), oceanic (MetROMS-UHel) and coupled (MAR-NEMO) models to compare the representation of the basic sea ice characteristics: sea ice albedo, snow and ice thickness, and meteorological data during the melt periods of two Antarctic domains with very different sea ice conditions, using data of the ISPOL and Marsden field campaigns. The models showed varying success, with some needing adjustment to better match observed conditions, highlighting the challenge of modelling sea ice’s diverse physical properties across different Antarctic regions.

Kristiina Verro delivering her presentation on describing sea ice albedo with models at EGU 2024

Sessions at EGU also provide an excellent opportunity for researchers to present their latest research using a summarizing poster. Session CR7.7 highlighted both recent advances in our knowledge of atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions, and new and emerging tools and datasets that can close these knowledge gaps. This session featured multiple poster presentations by PolarRES researchers including the following:

Cecilia Äijälä standing next to her poster which underscores the importance of refining models

All of this was nicely rounded off with a casual gathering for researchers from PolarRES to discuss ongoing and future work within the project. Our EGU24 meeting was a great chance to showcase how collaboration leads to progress in understanding and mitigating climate change!

A fun and productive get-together with PolarRES collaborators during EGU 2024

We are excited to share our research and inspire others to join us in creating a better future for the planet. We can not wait to connect at EGU25 for another exciting edition of the conference!