To contribute to reducing uncertainty in climate change forecasts, in August 2018, 15 institutions, including ETT, pooled their skills in a shared initiative to present a proposal for the tender LC-CLA-08-2018 “Addressing knowledge shortcomings in climate science in support of IPCC reports”
as part of the EU research and innovation programme Orizzonte 2020. This marked the start, on November 1st 2019, of the four-year project SO-CHIC (Southern Ocean – Carbon and Heat Impact on Climate).
ETT S.p.A.’s main contribution is the design and development of ICT infrastructure (data portal, data entry and integration procedures and data flow management) for the discovery, access and downloading of data generated and collected during the SO-CHIC project.
The Antarctic Ocean regulates global climate while controlling the exchanges of heat and carbon between the atmosphere and the ocean. It is responsible for around 60-90% of excess heat (i.e., associated with anthropogenic climate change) absorbed by the world’s oceans every year, and it is also well known for wide-scale controls of changes in the ten-year scale of the earth’s carbon, with key implications for decision-makers and a regular global inventory, as part of the Paris Agreement. In spite of the crucial importance of the climate, its representation in the global climate model is one of the main weaknesses in the simulation and projections for the climate because too little is known about the underlying processes.