The sustainable management of resources and environment is fundamentally about foresight. It depends critically on our capacity to observe, understand and eventually predict the transitions between past, present and future states of weather, climate, and the marine ecosystem. The diagnosis of the present Barents Sea environment and prognosis of its future can be based on empirical, conceptual, statistical, or physical models, or a combination thereof.

This work package focuses on what can be constrained from observations, including the Nansen Legacy fieldwork, and the synthesis of this empirical knowledge and related mechanistic understanding into a holistic description of the past, present, and future state of the Barents Sea.

The work package uses

1. A variety of numerical general circulation models (GCMs), including weather and sea ice forecast models, regional ice-ocean hindcast models, and fully coupled earth system models tailored for predicting (seasons to decades) or projecting (decades to centuries, including what-if scenarios) the future.
2. Biophysical, mechanistic, and non-deterministic ecosystem and food web models to investigate the likely impacts of expected future environmental changes.

The novelty of the work lies in how the combination of model approaches e.g., of process-based and non-deterministic models constitute a framework for the projection of ecosystem states into the future.