SAON News
The development of a structure for improved international coordination of Arctic oceanography, such as an Arctic GOOS (Global Ocean Observing System) Regional Alliance (GRA), has been recommended in various fora in recent years, including during the development of the Arctic Action Plan for the UN Ocean Decade and at various editions of the Arctic Observing Summit (most recently in 2022).
A Task Team has been formed under the SAON Board to design and lead a process that results in an Arctic GRA or similar structured organisation being realised.
More information about the Task Team and the Terms of Reference for this is found here
The Registry of Polar Observing Networks (RoPON) is now available online at https://polarobservingregistry.org.
RoPON is a catalogue of systems and related organisations that coordinate or track observing activities & infrastructure at high latitudes. It includes discovery-level details such as network description, observational scope, spatial extent, and data or metadata access, along with links for more information.
This registry was designed to facilitate discovery and integration across a multitude of local to international efforts. RoPON will help to:
- Co-locate and optimise limited resources
- Better inform local communities of activities nearby
- Guide network planning and assessment
- Make observing-related information more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (the FAIR Principles)
RoPON was created as a collaborative effort by the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks initiative (SAON, www.arcticobserving.org), the Arctic Portal (arcticportal.org), and the SAON Polar Observing Assets Working Group (POAwg, polarobservingassets.org). It has been released as a Phase 1 version for demonstration purposes. Plans are underway as funding allows for improvements in functionality, interoperability, and scope (e.g., more networks). A metadata model for describing observing networks has also been released (see polarobservingassets.org/resources).
Feedback is appreciated at halldor@arcticportal.org and info@polarobservingregistry.org.
The Arctic Council is pausing: https://www.arctic-council.org/
SAON recognizes and values its relationships with both the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee as outlined in its founding documents. For the time being, the SAON Board and its committees will be following the pause.
SAON and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) will be offering this year the first SAON-IASC Fellowship to support an early career researcher to get more involved in the work of SAON. As an open initiative uniting Arctic and non-Arctic nations and organizations, SAON holds a unique position in the facilitation of and planning for sustained Arctic observational networks in support of societal benefit. SAON has initiated the Roadmap for Arctic Observing and Data Systems (ROADS) as a planning framework to support its national and organizational partners. ROADS is at an initiating stage that presents many valuable opportunities to get involved. We envision that a ROADS Fellow could engage in the evolving governance of the ROADS Advisory Panel or support alignment and integration across pilot efforts that are beginning to form thematic Expert Panels under ROADS. The ROADS principle for equitable inclusion of Indigenous people presents further opportunities for shaping the governance of the ROADS process at its earliest stages.
More information is found here: https://www.apecs.is/news/apecs-news/iasc-fellowships-2022.html
Application deadline is Tuesday, 16 November 2021 at 13:00 GMT.
The diverse and distributed nature of observing systems in polar regions presents a fundamental challenge for assessment, planning, integration, and synthesis. There is an interest in creating overviews of these systems, since this, among other things, will allow more efficient use of facilities and allow for the understanding of where gaps in observation capacities exist. There is an interest in knowing answers to questions like “Who is going where? When are they going? What will they observe? What observing equipment will they have there? Who is responsible for organizing logistics?”, etc.
The purpose of this survey is to seek to create an overview of existing sources of information on polar observing facilities, systems and activities. This will allow the definition of procedures that can access these sources and compile the information from the various sources.
The survey is circulated to representatives from institutions, countries, initiatives and organisations that have an interest in polar observing, and it will seek to establish whether this information is already being coordinated and what interest there is in (further) developing the coordination of information about observing assets. The preamble of the survey emphasises the relationship with EU-PolarNet, but the we are encouraging all institutions, countries, initiatives and organisations (also outside Europe) to complete the survey. The resulting report will have a wider scope.
It should take no more than 10 min to complete the survey, and we should kindly ask you to do it by 1st August.
Link to survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdLRzHLuXCTcfsfzeIv-wI3aZqirqe9jdrnOk31XUnjfcBDRA/formResponse
