The Arctic is changing at a dramatic speed in response to the global warming. Management and planning of human activities in the Arctic, and in regions mostly affected by the Arctic climate change, depends on understanding of Arctic-particular physical, chemical, and biological processes that can only arise from systematic observations of key variables. However, the Arctic is difficult and expensive to access, and consequently in-situ observations are scarce and rarely sustained over long time. The international efforts to monitor components of the Arctic climate- and ecosystem from in-situ and remote sensing platforms are growing, but the observing systems including data management are largely uncoordinated. There are a number of international programmes and projects with focus on observing and documenting climate and environmental change, but in the Arctic, where the largest changes are found, there are huge gaps in the observing systems.

In this session, we invite presentations on the efforts done to catalogue and assess the existing Arctic observations, as well as the initiatives carried out to enhance the Arctic observational capacity and improve FAIR data access and reuse. The aim of the session is to foster the international collaboration among the actors playing a role in the Arctic observing systems (managers of infrastructures, manager of data, data collectors, data users) toward the optimization of the observing system. This effort is in line with the Road Map Task Force recently established by the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON) and it served the needs of Arctic data users at the local, regional, and global level.