ETT’s journey to Antarctica with the SO-CHIC project is coming to an end. From 28 to 30 October 2024, Antonio Novellino, ETT‘s R&D Manager in Smart & Sustainable Cities, was in Paris at the Sorbonne Université to participate in the project’s final meeting, during which the results obtained over the past few years will be discussed.
The SO-CHIC (Southern Ocean – Carbon and Heat Impact on Climate) project, funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme, focused on studying the key processes that regulate heat and carbon fluxes between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice in the Southern Ocean. These processes are key to understanding the mechanisms associated with global climate change.
ETT played a crucial role in the project, taking care of the infrastructure for the management and presentation of the collected data which enabled researchers to effectively process and analyse critical information on heat and carbon uptake in the oceans. In addition, ETT produced the project’s final booklet, a document that collects and illustrates the main objectives, achievements and stories of the actors involved, combining visual and scientific storytelling.
The Paris meeting represents an important opportunity to consolidate these results and outline new guidelines for future research contributing to climate change monitoring and mitigation. In particular, the project partners will meet for the last time at the SO-CHIC Final General Assembly and Science Workshop, a workshop that will focus on four key themes:
Theme 1: Small-scale (1-10 km) and transient (days to weeks) processes of the mixing layer.
Theme 2: Open ocean polynya events: causes and consequences on ocean-atmosphere interaction.
Theme 3: Origin and fate of global bottom waters.
Theme 4: Heat and carbon fluxes between air and sea and storage in the Southern Ocean.
During the scientific workshop, the results of this successful project will be summarised and made available in the form of a white paper, providing a comprehensive overview of the advances in climate research.