Deliverable 1.4 Collaboration establishment

One of the specific objectives of INTAROS WP1 is to establish collaboration with research groups and other actors who play an important role to develop multidisciplinary observing systems for the Arctic. This report described the activities and results of the connections and collaboration during the first 2.5 years of the project. In this period INTAROS has been present and given presentations at ≈ 150 meetings, workshops and conferences in order to establish collaboration with other projects, organisations and stakeholder groups involved in Arctic observing systems.

The development of collaboration is a continuous ongoing process, in particular collaboration with EU Polarnet and the other H2020 projects under the Arctic Cluster is in progress. Also, collaboration with other projects and programmes in Europe, North America and Asia is under development. This includes SAON, Arctic Science Summit Week, Arctic Observing Summit, European projects, and projects in USA, Canada, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. Such collaboration is required in order to build an integrated Arctic Observing System covering the pan-Arctic region.

The collaboration includes participation in and organization of conference sessions, workshops, and stakeholder events across the pan-Arctic area. Furthermore, joint projects are established to fund more collaboration activities, including joint field experiments and data sharing agreements. Also MoUs are developed between institutions to enable long-term collaboration. In Europe, collaboration with Copernicus programme and various research infrastructure programmes is in progress, because these programmes have long-term funding perspectives and build on research priorities which incorporate Arctic observing. Through Copernicus services and Polar programmes under the Space Agencies, the production and delivery of satellite data for Arctic observing is growing strongly. The INTAROS consortium is well-connected to these programmes and exploits satellite data in a number of Arctic observing case studies.

The connection with research groups, operational agencies and other actors who play a role in developing Arctic observing systems is an important prerequisite for the Roadmap, which is under development and will be a major deliverable in INTAROS. The plan was to establish a Pan-Arctic Observing Forum as a milestone towards the Roadmap, but this plan has been changed as a result of the collaboration with SAON. In the SAON Implementation plan, one of the goals is to “create a roadmap to well-integrated Arctic observing system” and INTAROS is invited to participate in this work. The role that was envisaged for the Pan-Arctic Observing Forum is already taken care of by SAON. It is therefore not necessary to establish this forum. Instead, INTAROS has now become a member of the SAON Roadmap Task Force, which has started to develop documents related to the Roadmap. Key milestones for the Roadmap work will be the Arctic Observing Summit/Arctic Science Summit Week in March and the Third Arctic Science Ministerial in autumn of 2020. The INTAROS Roadmap document is due in autumn of 2021. This mean that the INTAROS Roadmap can incorporate the outcomes from the Ministerial meeting.