Brief Description of Organisation:

As the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, the Alfred Wegener Institute is primarily active in the cold and temperate regions of the world. Working together with numerous national and international partners, we are actively involved in unravelling the complex processes at work in the “Earth System”. Our planet is undergoing fundamental climate change; the polar regions and the oceans, which play central roles in the global climate system, are in flux. How will planet Earth evolve? Do the phenomena we’re observing represent short-term fluctuations or long-term trends? Polar and marine research has always been a fascinating scientific challenge; today it is also research into the future. With our marine stations Helgoland and Sylt we have two research locations in the North Sea and therefore excellent research facilities for the main focus area North Sea in the project. We operate long term datasets for the North Sea and the Arctic ocean which are outstanding with respect to their relevance for climate change research.

With the AWI centre for scientific diving, which hosts the work group "In situ ecology and technology", the AWI has a technology and research facility well known across Europe with a high expertise in applied underwater technology in coastal temperate and coastal waters.

JERICO-S3: Main tasks attributed under Work Packages:

Within the work package we will focus on the assessment of environmental changes in the North Sea (and in the Arctic Ocean) using our well-established underwater node technology. We specifically will focus on temporal and spatial environmental dynamics in high energy coastal areas which are often hardly to assess due to bad weather conditions. In many of these areas bad weather conditions with wind speeds beyond 6 bft are rather normal than the exception. An increasing frequency of storms and bad weather conditions in temperate coastal areas are however a possible climate change scenario. The focus of our work will therefore be an improvement of the possibility of doing research in those focal areas which are well known as most important for climate change research questions - but where research in a sufficient temporal and spatial resolution is often problematic due to bad weather conditions.

Relevant Projects- previous and existing:

MOSES (https://www.ufz.de/moses/). Towards a cross compartment earth-observatory system.
ACROSS (http://across-project.de/welcome/) A Ground Truth Demo and Test Facility.
COSYNA (https://webapp.hzg.de/#/home)