PARAMOUR PROJECT
The climate of the polar regions has dramatically changed over the last decades, predominantly resulting from external forcing (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions), supplemented by natural variability. Quantifying the specific contribution of these components is critical to understand decadal climate variability, but it is also challenging. Therefore, the PARAMOUR project (Decadal Predictability and Variability of Polar Climate: the Role of Atmosphere-Ocean-Cryosphere Multiscale Interactions) aims at improving the understanding of key processes that control the variability of the ice-ocean-atmosphere system at decadal time scale. Furthermore, determining how those interactions will lead to some predictability of the full ice-ocean- atmosphere system (or of some specific components only) is of importance. Ultimately, retrospective (1980-2015) and prospective (2015-2045) climate simulations at high resolution will be conducted to evaluate the respective roles of initial conditions, some specific physical processes, teleconnections and couplings in the recent trends and to appreciate the potential fluctuations of key climate indicators within the next decades. The project is funded by FWO-FNRS and is a collaboration between different Belgian universities (VUB, ULB, KULeuven, UCL and ULiège). The role of the VUB is concentrated on the Arctic configuration and the modeling of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Find more information here.