INTAROS has collaborated with actors involved in Arctic observing systems for climate and environmental monitoring at national, European and international levels. INTAROS has engaged a large group of stakeholders from public and private sector, including research and local communities. Broad involvement is required to build an integrated Arctic Observing System useful for the society. Together with EU Polarnet, INTAROS has strengthened the European involvement in SAON. Several INTAROS partners have been members of the SAON and contributed to the SAON Roadmap for Arctic Observing and Data Systems (ROADS). INTAROS has developed a roadmap which is complementary to the more high-level SAON roadmap.
Atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial observing systems have been assessed showing that most of these were funded by national agencies and primarily used for climate research. Research infrastructures have long-term funding and mature data management procedures, while observing systems supported in a sequence of short-term projects have much less mature data management procedures. To mitigate, earmarked funding for data management should be available. Existing research structures are not yet present in the Arctic. Pathways for transfer emerging observing systems into sustained research infrastructures must be established. The evolution of Arctic in situ observing systems can be monitored by ARCMAP (
https://arcmap.nersc.no(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)).
INTAROS has supported development and testing of innovative and robust technologies that can operate year-round in Arctic conditions. One important goal was to fill gaps in existing observing systems e.g. ocean acidification, biogeochemical parameters, snow-water equivalents, snow albedo, and microplastic. Selected multi disciplinary observing systems in key regions of the Arctic have been extended and improved by new sensors and technologies e.g. mooring systems and terrestrial stations.
A total of 30 existing community-based observing programs across the eight Arctic countries have been surveyed and analysed. Efforts have focused on community-based observing networks in Greenland and Svalbard, and to explore links between community-based observing and international databases. INTAROS and local communities in the Arctic developed a library of best practises for combining community-based monitoring with scientific knowledge.
Interoperable data systems are central in the data delivery chain providing support in quality control, documentation, formatting of observations, and ingestion into interoperable data repositories. Partners has registered their datasets in the INTAROS data catalogue, promoted by the iAOS portal (
https://portal-intaros.nersc.no(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)). Applications using INTAROS data have been developed for 1) assimilation into climate models, 2) ecosystem models, 3) analysis of ice-ocean observations and models, 4) environmental assessment, 5) atmospheric models, 6) natural geohazard assessments. The results will be used as recommendations to the Copernicus service providers on how to use in situ data to improve the validation of the services. Showcases defined by scientists addressing specific stakeholders have demonstrated the use of iAOS cloud platform.
The project has produced more than 90 publications.
