The project aims at establishing a Nordic Snow Network in five meteorological institutes.

Snow cover is an essential climate variable directly affecting the earth energy balance. Proper description and assimilation of snow cover information into hydrological, land surface, meteorological and climate models are critical to address the impact of snow on various phenomena, to predict local snow water resources and to warn about snow-related natural hazards. This induces a challenging problem of bridging information from micro-structural scales of the snowpack up to the grid resolution in models.

The proposed project will address these issues with 5 national meteorological institutes (NMI (Norway), DMI (Denmark), FMI (Finland), SMHI (Sweden) and IMO (Iceland)), universities (Agricultural University of Iceland, Reykjavik University-Iceland and University of Tartu-Estonia) and Asiaq – Greenland Survey from Greenland through establishing a Nordic snow network.

The point of view of the network will be focused on snow in Nordic and related Arctic areas: making existing Nordic-Arctic research and snow data from observations and models (forecasts and assimilated observations by weather and hydrology models, projections by the climate models) visible for the researcher, data user and education communities. It supports snow-related research and development of applications by the exchange of information and data, arranging workshops, training and supporting also informal Nordic researcher contacts and meetings.

Applicant: Jouni Pulliainen, Finnish Meteorological Institute

Partners: Finnish Meteorological Institute; Agricultural Institute of Iceland; Reykjavik Uni Iceland; Swedish Meteorological Institute; University of Tartu; Asiaq Greenland; Danish Meteorological Institute Denmark.

Countries: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Sweden, Estonia

Project start and expected to be finalized in 2019.

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