The monitoring of the Arctic is very important as the changes in Arctic are the indicators of climate change. Snow cover is an essential climate variable directly affecting the Earth energy balance. Proper description and assimilation of snow cover information into hydrological, land surface, meteorological and climate models is critical to address the impact of snow on various phenomena, to predict local snow water resources and to warn about snow-related natural hazards. This induces a challenging problem of bridging information from micro-structural scales of the snowpack up to the grid resolution in regional and global models.
Traditional or local knowledge of indigenous people is very important in terms of human interaction with the lands and water in thousands of years. Snow has been a vital water resource, navigation and weather prediction support and a key to their culture and livelihoods.
Research and security in the Arctic region require comprehensive snow observations and modelling. Analysing and forecasting the temporal and spatial variability of snow is important for weather prediction as well as for climatic and hydrological purposes. Understanding the changes in snow conditions are particularly important for rapidly warming Arctic regions.
The Thematic Network, entitled, “Nordic Snow Network (NordSnowNet)“ network will be focus on snow and snow related topics such as snow on sea ice, glaciers, snow-related hazards, snow-related environmental issues and social impacts to indigenous and local community in related Arctic areas: making existing Nordic-Arctic research and snow data from observations and models (forecasts and assimilated observations by weather and hydrology models, projections by the climate models) visible for the researcher, data user and education communities. It would support snow-related research and development of applications by exchange of information and data, arranging workshops, training and supporting also informal researcher contacts and meetings.