Studying the ocean's role in climate change
A key pre-requisite for the prediction of climate change is the in-depth understanding and monitoring of the oceanic heat and freshwater fluxes. Particularly, the climate in north- west Europe, the Nordic seas and Scandinavia has become warmer and more sensitive to change during the last decade. It is foreseen that the climate will change more rapidly and radically within the next years, as related anthropogenic factors are increasingly becoming more intense. The mitigation of socio-economic effects heavily relies on the development of suitable and reliable predictive models of the involved processes. Addressing this issue, the ASOF-W project focused on obtaining time series measurements of the oceanic fluxes for improving the predictive skills for seasonal to decadal climate variability. Such studies can not be performed on a regional basis; rather, they require the joint efforts of the wider scientific community. Following the results coming from earlier projects (EC-VEINS) project researchers extended the time series measurements of the dense Denmark Strait for a decade. The three ASOF-W, ASOF-N and ASOF-E (MOEN) ran in parallel and form a more generic project, named ASOF-EC. The ASOF-EC cluster of projects provides a comprehensive set of measurements concerning water flux-variability between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, the ASOF-EC project work urged the development of the ASOF-International project that focused on measurements of fluxes from the Arctic Ocean to the Sub-arctic Ocean. This expansion of scientific cooperation from a European to an international level provided better scientific and technological planning for the international polar year (IPY) programme (2007-9). This large scientific programme focuses on the Arctic and the Antarctic areas and covers many topics related to atmosphere, ice, land, oceans, people and space. For more information on the ASOF projects click at: http://www.ifm.uni-hamburg.de/
