The National Antarctic Scientific Center together with 30 scientific organizations from around the world will model climate change in Antarctica and the Arctic. The project “Polar Regions in the Earth System: the Role of Local and Regional Polar Processes in Changing the Polar Climate and the Global Climate System” (PolarRES) won the EU Horizon 2020 grant.
The research consortium will include scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Germany, China and other countries.
The project targets almost 8 million euros over a period of 4 years, in particular, 132 thousand euros will come to Ukraine.
Researchers will study how the dynamics of atmospheric processes, melting glaciers, sea-level rise and ocean acidification affect the formation of the regional polar climate. Models will be applied and refined to predict different scenarios of polar climate change depending on a number of factors, primarily human activity.
The research will take place in parallel in both Polar Regions of the planet – the Arctic and Antarctica.
“Participation of our scientists in such a large-scale international project proves once again that in Ukraine the Antarctic science is a “window of opportunity”, which allows domestic scientists to participate in solving global world problems. One of these problems is climate change, which we have seen very clearly in Antarctica for a long time and which in recent years had a strong impact on Ukraine. Not only continuous series of meteorological observations but also the behavior of animals, the state of plants and glaciers give us signals about this, “said NASC Director Evgen Dykyi.
As part of the project NASC will provide climate data from the Ukrainian Antarctic Akademik Vernadsky station, participate in the verification of relevant models, as well as make its own analysis of atmospheric processes.
We recall that now at the station operates the most modern meteorological complex of all Ukrainian meteorological stations. It transmits many parameters online, in particular to the global data exchange system of the World Meteorological Organization.