The 2024 CANARI Annual Meeting
During 17-19 September we held the 3rd CANARI Annual Meeting. As has become tradition, we gathered at one of our research centres – this time the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford – for three days of project updates, science highlight talks, posters, lively breakout discussions, and of course, an important chance to catch up with colleagues in person.
Set in the beautiful south Oxfordshire countryside, the UKCEH site is located on the bank of the river Thames. Our UKCEH lead – Prof Jamie Hannaford – kicked off the meeting with an excellent potted history of the historic market town before principal investigator Prof Len Shaffrey and all the work package leaders brought the 65 participants up to speed with their project updates.
In total, fifteen science highlight talks covered the full range of the latest CANARI research findings, from deep dives into hypotheses for how the structure and dynamics of the Arctic ocean will change as sea ice continues to decline, through understanding the implications for climate variability and change in the North Atlantic, and quantifying associated impacts on the UK associated with trends and variability of heatwaves, flooding, drought and the health of our shelf seas.
The discussion of new science continued throughout the meeting with over twenty science posters being presented at the poster session and ten breakout sessions covering everything from detailed discussions around plans for future modelling activities within the programme, to blue skies thinking around exciting new research topics and ideas for collaborations.
We rounded off the meeting with a hands-on plenary session activity where we tasked our scientists to work in small cross-cutting groups to sketch out their views of the most important physical climate linkages between the Arctic and the UK, and to present back to the meeting their case including, crucially, which linkages are currently most uncertain.
We are looking forward to the chance to do it all again this time next year, but also to the the upcoming cross-centre CANARI activities we have in the pipeline, particularly our next coding and analysis SPRINT early in 2025.
