NORWAY
National Contact	Abdirahman Omar
Email	abdir.omargfi.uib.no
Website	None
Full Report (pdf)	Jun 02 Mar 06

 

Current status of SOLAS planning.

Norwegian SOLAS at present has no direct funding to conduct SOLAS science from national grants. Some activities might be expressed as science related to SOLAS and some science proposals will address some of the key questions. They will be sent to the Norwegian Research Council to meet the summer and fall deadlines and will be labelled as Norwegian SOLAS activities. We have so far been more successful in obtaining EU-funds. Projects focussed on making long-term measurements of the natural variability of CO2 in the North Atlantic have been generated (as an example the EU-CAVASSOO-project, which includes scientists from UK, Germany, France, Spain and Norway).

The Norwegian Research Council has expressed great interest in SOLAS-science. Being optimistic, I conclude that there are good future opportunities to get SOLAS science funded in Norway, to support both the atmospheric and oceanographic science required in the SOLAS Science Plan.

Future plans for national activities.

Norway can be involved in all three foci, and plans to do this in different proposals to the Norwegian Research Council and in EU-funded science. There is also a dialogue among the Norwegian SOLAS group of scientists regarding constructing a SOLAS dedicated programme/project. Applications, which directly target the SOLAS Science Plan, will include atmospheric and oceanic studies. There is one on air/sea exchange processes that includes up-scaling to climate systems like the North Atlantic Oscillation, and coupled atmosphere-ocean GCMs. More focussed studies are on the effect of pH on ecosystems, studied in mesocosms. In addition, there are future plans to conduct open ocean experiments on DMS-production, iron limitation in fjords and pH stress. In the Antarctic Ocean there are plans to participate, in cooperation with other nations, in iron release experiments, etc.

Opportunities for national participation in international SOLAS activities.

Norway has considerable expertise in SOLAS-type science, such as the cycling of bioreactive gases between and in ocean and atmosphere (eg, DMS, CO2, iodocarbons (just atmosphere)). Norway provides skilled scientists in conducting cruises, performing mesocosm perturbation experiments, providing state of art laboratories for atmosphere and ocean measurements of SOLAS key and needed variables. In addition, on modelling aspects, there are models ranging from process to coupled three dimensional between atmosphere and ocean, and sea salt and dust are implemented in some of these. Norway measures some of the key variables in air-sea exchange and wishes to get more strongly involved in ocean Lagrangian and perturbation studies. Norway has already participated in such studies at the international level.