Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System, regionally distributed, multinational and multidisciplinary Research Infrastructure

Climate warming in Arctic is 3-4 faster than in rest of the globe. Even in Arctic context Svalbard is a hotspot of climate change but also international research collaboration and geopolitics. Svalbard is under Norwegian sovereignty but it has very international research environment based partly on Svalbard Treaty. This creates an ambiguous and continuously changing operational landscape as geopolitical tensions increases.  

Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS) is an international consortium of 29 research institutions from 10 countries with research interests and infrastructure in and around Svalbard. Mission of SIOS is to make ESS data in and round Svalbard available through the SIOS data management system following FAIR principles, decrease the environmental footprint of science by pooling resources and enabling new technology, sharing infrastructure and facilitating interdisciplinary research collaboration.

SIOS focuses on long-term monitoring of parameters that are important to understand the Arctic in the context of global environmental change. However, the observing system is dynamic and is developed continuously by so called SIOS Science Wheel concept. A State of Environmental Science in Svalbard reports (SESS) is in the core of the Science Wheel. The SESS report is an arena for open sharing of ideas and discussions on measures that should be taken to enable scientists to provide observations needed to gain a comprehensive view of the Earth System of Svalbard and the Arctic in general. The report summarises the state of current knowledge of key Earth System Science parameters and analyses how these parameters influence one another. It combines the long-term monitoring data that form the core of the observing system with innovative monitoring and research.

SIOS Access program has been developed to foster excellent Arctic science and to facilitate research infrastructures to function at ideal capacity. SIOS has built its own training programs which for example help field scientists to utilize different level of remote sensing in their research and planning field campaigns.

In this presentation we will share our experiences on building SIOS, multinational and multidisciplinary research infrastructure, Science wheel success stories, challenges and lessons learned and way forward towards IPY 2032-2033.