Report from the second Nordic course on e-science tools for climate research

Our second 10-day course on e-science tools for climate research has successfully been held at the Andøya Space Center in northern Norway ( 22nd of October –  2nd of November 2018). The course ”Climate science at high latitudes: Modeling and model evaluation” is part of a series led by Stockholm University (ACES) in collaboration with the University of Helsinki, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute/University of Oslo, the latter being responsible for the Andøya course. The focus was set around the evaluation of earth system models (NorESM) using long-term observations from the Arctic region.

25 PhD and master students from various Nordic institutions joined the course, accompanied by five teachers and eight assistants. Students were introduced to open-source software like Python and Jupyter notebook to analyze, visualize and document climate data, utilizing the Norwegian infrastructure for computational science (NIRD). Introduction lectures to Arctic climate, climate modelling, measurement techniques and current tools used for model-measurement evaluation were given. The main part of this course consisted of group work. For this task, the students were grouped into six groups each led by one or two assistants. All are now preparing their report contained in a Jupyter notebook.

During their free time, all participants enjoyed the fantastic landscape of Andøya with hikes, bike rides and nightly observations of polar lights, a tour through the Andøya Space Centre, a visit to the close-by Alomar observatory (Arctic Lidar Observatory for Middle Atmosphere Research) and the whale museum at Andenes. A few of the brave participants joined an unforgettable whale-watching tour. The next course will take place in fall 2019 at Abisko, Sweden: “Atmospheric science at high latitudes: eScience for linking Arctic measurements and modeling“. The course was co-funded by Nordforsk, the Bolin Centre, eSTICC, the Univ. of Oslo, CHESS and NAROM.

Text: Michael Schulz, Paul Zieger
Foto credit: Jonas Gliss, Paul Zieger,