PCAPS-related highlights from the SCAR OSC in Pucón, Chile (19 - 22 August 2024)
The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s (SCAR) Open Science Conference (OSC), which had not been held in person since 2018, brought approximately 1,300 Antarctic researchers and experts to Pucón, Chile from 19 to 22 August, 2024. Among them were three members of the PCAPS Steering Group: Clare Eayrs, Machiel Lamers, and Daniela Liggett. Aside from presenting their own research, Clare, Machiel and Daniela used the opportunity to network and create greater awareness about PCAPS in the Antarctic community.
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? The PCAPS project will pursue advances in polar science to understand these complex and rapidly changing environments.
New project –Turbulence and Supercool Clouds in Antarctica (T-SCAN) – to begin January 2025
The forthcoming T-SCAN project, funded by the National Weather Service of Argentina, the Argentine Antarctic Institute, and the Institute of Polar Science within Italy’s National Research Council, will consist of a field campaign that will combine balloon-borne measurements and super liquid water content (SLWC) probes with remote observations from ground based instruments to study cloud dynamics and their relation with turbulence, in the adverse region of the Antarctic Peninsula, during the austral summer of 2025.
The Svalbard Marginal Ice Zone Campaign 2024 completed
A recent observational campaign (Spring 2024) in the Marginal Ice Zone, which collected measurements about the atmosphere, wave, and sea-ice systems, has initiated a large-scale model intercomparison to better understand our state-of-the-art coupled forecasting systems.
First annual PCAPS Steering Group Meeting held in Hobart
The first annual Steering Group (SG) meeting for the Polar Coupled Analysis and Prediction for Services (PCAPS) Project was held at the Bureau of Meteorology’s Office in Hobart, Australia from 15 to 19 March 2024. The SG reviewed and significantly updated the draft version of the PCAPS Project Plan, which serves as the guiding framework for the PCAPS project. The SG also meet with a number of stakeholders to discuss their needs and uses for polar environmental services.