Mountains and Polar Regions - an exchange on Cold Regions within the GEO Work Programme

The aim of this session is to provide a platform for activities of the GEO Work Programme working on mountains and cold polar regions to exchange and investigate possible synergies especially in respect to essential variables, given the many common challenges that are often encountered. The session will include contributions from representatives of GEO Mountains and Arctic GEOSS. The session is especially timely because 2022 has been declared by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Sustainable Mountain Development (IYM2022) following Year of Polar Prediction. The agenda is broken down into three parts: i) mountains (30 minutes), ii) Arctic GEOSS (30 minutes), and iii) mountain-Arctic synergies, including on the topic of Essential Variables.

1. Microclimate monitoring in mountains (and high latitude areas) across the globe – Jonas Lembrechts, University of Antwerp
2. Assessing the local signals of natural and anthropogenic climate change along a steep elevational gradient in the northern Andes – Daniel Ruiz Carrascal, Independent Researcher
3. Future elevation-dependent warming in the tropical and subtropical Andes – Elisa Palazzi, University of Turin and GEO Mountains Co-Lead
4. Arctic Passion upgrading Arctic GEOSS into a GEO initiative - Michael Karcher, Alfred Wegener Institute, Arctic Passion coordinator
5. RNA-CoObs Research Network for the Arctic Coproduction of Observations - Alice Bradley, Williams College, USA
6. Canadian sister to Arctic Passion - Maribeth Murray, Arctic Institute of Northern America, project coordinator
7. ROADS-process for Shared Arctic Variables, Sandy Starkweather, University of Colorado, US AON chair
8. Toward a definition of Essential Mountain Climate Variables. James Thornton, Mountain Research Initiative.

Moderator will be Mikko Strahlendorff, Finnish Meteorological Institute, GEO Principal of Finland