2008 report
Progress: 60%
UNIS and UiB:
The IPY International Sea-Ice Summer School (www.seaice.info) was successfully completed at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS, www.unis.no) in Longyearbyen during 2-13 July 2007. 92 participants from 16 different nations and 23 lecturers from 12 different nations gathered for two very intense and interesting weeks of science, social events and outdoor activities. The main focus of the scientific programme was on sea ice physics, mechanics and dynamics, but it also included marine ice fauna biology, biogeochemical processes, remote sensing and paleo-oceanography. A total of 66 hours of lectures were given, with two additional poster sessions where most participants presented their work. Outside the university, a busy social programme allowed the participants and lecturers to get to know each other and to talk about the latest in sea-ice research.
This was the third time in history that a sea-ice summer school was organized, following similar events in Italy in 1981 and Finland in 1994. The aim was to gather world's foremost experts in the field today, to educate tomorrow's sea ice experts and to inspire and stimulate networking and cooperation within the sea-ice research community. A textbook based on the lectures given at the summer school is planned to be produced.
The idea of arranging the summer school came up in 2004. Two former UNIS-students, Dirk Notz and Karolina Widell, sat one evening in Longyearbyen after fieldwork and realized that they did not really know too much about sea ice. Though being considered to be of great importance in climate, sea ice is poorly represented in global climate models and many aspects of it remain to be investigated. So why not gather experts and students in Svalbard and just talk about sea ice and global climate change for a while? The idea was born and it was clear from the start that the ideal place for such a summer school would be UNIS.
There was an overwhelming response both from the invited speakers and from students who were interested in attending: more than 170 student applications were received before the application deadline. The positive and enthusiastic attitude prevailed throughout the two weeks with activities every day. The poster sessions continued until nearly midnight after long days of lectures. It seemed that the midnight sun, good weather and stimulating exchange kept the energy level high among all present, hopefully with a lasting effect on the coming years of sea-ice research. It is planned that the summer-school website (www.seaice.info) will become one of the central sources of sea-ice related information, which also provide a platform for students and scientists alike to keep the spirit of the summer school alive for years to come.
The number of applications for the school exceeded our expectations by far - more than 170 students and PostDocs from around the world were competing for the roughly 80+ places we were able to offer at the school. During the selection process, main emphasis was put on choosing those candidates who would profit most from joining the school. This includes for example PhD-students and PostDocs working on a sea-ice related research project. This criterion helped us to reduce the number of suitable candidates to around 100. Further selection did then occur according to our attempt to get a relatively broad range of subjects and of nations to be represented at the school.
The International Sea-Ice Summer School is part of the International Polar Year (IPY). The summer school was made possible by funding from the Nordic Council of Ministers and both Norwegian, The Norwegian research Council through two IPY projects, iAOOS Norway and BIAC, and the EU research project DAMOCLES. The contribution from DAMOCLES was the first confirmed funding in the summer school application process, and the arrangement committee would like to emphasise that this contribution triggered all the other funding possibilities since we could argue that EU through DAMOCLES already supported our ideas and plans. Read more about the summer school at www.seaice.info.
A report on the summer school has been provided (Deliverable D7.3-05).
OASys and FastOpt
A training workshop on data assimilation and numerical modelling was organised by OASys and FastOpt in Bremen on December 06 - 07, 2006 in connection with the DAMOCLES Annual meeting. The target audience ranged form graduate students to senior scientists with basic knowledge in programming and mathematics and was not restricted to DAMOCLES participants. Each day of the course included four hours of lectures plus four hours of hands-on exercises. Day 1 was focused on modelling and culminated in the construction of a simple box model of the Arctic. Day 2 was focused on sensitivity studies and data assimilation (see WP4). The simple box model was employed to introduce and demonstrate the WP4 concepts, i..e. tangent linear and adjoint sensitivities and variational data assimilation.
Lectures and support with hands-on exercises were given by Ralf Giering., Thomas Kaminski, Michael Karcher, Frank Kauker and Michael Vossbeck. In addition Martin Losch (AWI) was subcontracted to lecture on large scale data assimilations using the adjoint MITgcm. The course was attended by 20 participants in total, 16 of which were affiliated with DAMOCLES partners (SMHI, AWI, University of Gothenburg, FIMR, Ifremer, DMI, IOPAS, UCL, University of Bremen) and four were from Max Planck Insitute in Hamburg, Max Planck institute in Jena, Université Libre Bruxelles and MIT. The participant were assisted with installation of software. Working groups were formed, which turned out to be very successful.
The final discussion with the participants revealed that the short course was in general very well received. The following points were raised: (1) The organisers should have stressed more the necessity of properly set-up notebooks; a terminal room would have been favourable. (2) The combination of lectures and hands-on work was appreciated. Lectures only would have been scary, but exercises demonstrated that things are not as complicated as anticipated. (3) It was nice to play around with a simple variational data assimilation system. (4) The course should be repeated, possibly extended by one day, because it was hard to digest all the material in just two days.
A debriefing meeting of the organisers was held on 21/12/2006 at fastOpt-OASys HQ in Hamburg. The main lessons for the potential future course are: (1) Enforce team work, because it has proved both successful and pleasant for the participants in the teams; (2) It was good not to arrange internet access, so participants were not distracted; (3) We could not make a clear conclusion on whether we should enforce the readiness of the participants notebooks, e.g by asking them to send the output file of the software check script we had provided; (4) Didactically, it may be beneficial to have each lectures immediately followed by corresponding hands-on work.
A report on the short course was provided (Deliverable D.7.3.02)
FORTH : During the second year FORTH worked on the organization of the 2008 summer school in underwater acoustics. The summer school will take place at the premises of FORTH from 18 to 27 June 2008. A number of leading experts in underwater acoustics have been invited to give lectures on topics spanning a broad spectrum of underwater acoustics, from propagation modelling and medium effects to ocean acoustic tomography, high-latitude acoustics and acoustics of marine mammals. More information can be obtained from the summer school web site (http://ssua08.iacm.forth.gr/)
