Breaking New Ice: What PCAPS means to polar communities and services
We know that what happens in the polar regions does not stay there; these areas have global implications. But we tend not to think as much about the people who live there, work there and visit there. How do they navigate their environment of sea, ice, snow and wind? What information do they have to work with? How can we make their information better, their lives safer?
Photo credit: Ramcharan Vijayaraghavan.
The Polar Coupled Analysis and Forecast for Services (PCAPS) project will pursue advances in polar science to understand these complex and rapidly changing environments. The project is one of the newest projects of the World Weather Research Programme of WMO. It builds on the successful Polar Prediction Project and Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP), which collected unprecedented observations that will allow us to improve our understanding of processes across land, sea and ice boundaries where some of the largest errors in our computer models occur. In addition to continuing these science advances,
PCAPS has broader goals to build connections across scientific, operational, service and local communities to turn raw forecasts into useful information.
PCAPS will also build the trust needed to turn information into action and meaningful outcomes; where, when and how is it safe to travel, for travel is the key to life and livelihoods.
PCAPS will drive toward early warnings for all the polar regions, accounting for the needs of those warnings to adapt to the rapidly changing polar climates.
This directly addresses the goals of WWRP, which are to turn Earth System Science into actionable information appropriate for the changing climate, and with a quantification and communication of the confidence of forecast information needed for decisions. But moreover, the project seeks to bring communities together through trust that arises from the actionability, sustainability and fidelity of the science.
Photo credit: Ramcharan Vijayaraghavan.
The annual WWRP Scientific Steering Committee meeting will be a hybrid meeting between 3 to 6 September 2024, bringing together the current and new WWRP community members to detail our future plans. The PCAPS project will be one of the new projects to be discussed and approved by the WWRP SSC, and then we will circulate the new project plans to the Research Board for their approval and ultimately take it to WMO Executive Council in 2025 for their approval.