While trying to find out why the TOPAZ forecast maps were no longer updated I came into contact with Dr Laurent Bertino, a research director at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center who is responsible for the TOPAZ system that is delivered as part of the MyOcean project.
Not only did he direct me to the new dynamic viewer that contains the images of sea ice thickness (and much more), but he also consented in my request for a short interview.
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N: Laurent Bertino, thanks for this interview. What is it you do exactly over at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center?
LB: The Nansen Center is a private research foundation (~60 persons) with various activities in climate research, remote sensing, modeling and data assimilation, the latter two are the activities I am personally involved in. See our fresh new web-site for more information: http://www.nersc.no/
What we call "data assimilation" is working out the combination of numerical model forecast and observations that makes a forecast most accurate. This is a field at the crossroads of mathematics, statistics, physics and computer sciences.
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N: There are several discrepancies between the sea ice thickness models. I discussed them in a recent blog post and follow-up. PIPS 2.0 for instance is showing a lot more thick ice than TOPAZ. What are your thoughts on this?
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