Presentations and new connections at Polar Night Week

In January 2023, Audrey Schillings, Postdoctoral fellow at Department of Physics, and associated researcher at the Arctic Centre at Umeå University, went to Polar Night Week in Svalbard with funding from the Arctic Centre. There she and her colleagues presented their chapter in the State of Environment Science in Svalbard report, and made new connections.

Thanks to funding from Arctic Centre’s Strategic funds, Audrey Schillings could participate in the Polar Night Week (PNW) in Svalbard, 23–27 January 2023.

– On Monday, we presented our chapter “Seasonal asymmetries and long-term trends in atmospheric and ionospheric temperatures in polar regions and their dependence on solar activity” for stakeholders and the general public, Schillings shares. The report was written for the State of Environment Science in Svalbard (SESS) report and funded by Svalbard Integrated arctic earth Observing System (SIOS).

Schillings and her colleagues in Longyearbyen, Svalbard.

From the left: Antonia Radlwimmer, Brandon Van Schaik, and Audrey Schillings.

The Polar Night Week also offered some interesting exchanges for Schillings. She and her colleagues from the report met with some marine biology scientists who were studying lagoons and who discovered a new one last summer.

– We exchanged some contacts, and we may apply for a small call combining satellites data images and optical measurements to the area of the lagoon they are working on. With the parameters retrieved from the satellites, the hydrological model used to better define the area of the lagoon will be improved. If this case study is successful, the idea could be extended to the few hundred unstudied lagoons on Svalbard, Schillings says.

The interdisciplinary research and projects presented during the week were very inspiring and interesting

Throughout the week, several associations, universities, and institutions doing research in the Arctic, presented their work and vision for the future of Svalbard and the Arctic. Some of these were The UArctic, in partnership with several universities, who presented a vision for collaboration and development of an Arctic Earth System Science education program. Aarhus University in Denmark presented the data portal ISAAFFIK, which is a gateway to all scientific projects in Arctic. Then the SIOS-InfraNor project was presented, an investment in scientific and research instruments in Svalbard, funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Space Agency.

Schillings concludes:

– The interdisciplinary research and projects presented during the week were very inspiring and interesting even though the space community was not well represented.

SIOS is an organization in Svalbard that consists of several partners in the world, all doing research in Svalbard and the Arctic. Umeå University is a member institution through the Swedish Polar Institute, and SIOS was happy to have a Swedish representative in the PNW.