7. User groups and international cooperation

There is considerable interest from national research teams and user groups. It is notable that the users are not only specialists in physical and chemical oceanography like ourselves (such as Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), but includes climate modellers (such as at UNI-Bjerknes), top paleoclimate groups (such as at UiTø Geology and UNI-Bjerknes), marine biologists and ecologists (such as at UiTø Biology), polar climate researchers (such as Norwegian Polar Institute ICE), institutions with operational monitoring and forecasting activities (such as Met.no), international research on operational oceanography and national role in providing remote sensing data (NERSC) and broad cross-disciplinary marine responsibilities (such as IMR).

There is mutual benefit from interacting with the float experiment other research institutions plan in the area. Measurments in the Svinøy section area and at station M have been key in several international collaborative projects because of their inherent value. The quality improvement offered by NACO opens possibilities for strengthened and widened international collaboration both towards efforts further south in the North Atlantic and northwards towards pan-Arctic projects.

The public sector will benefit indirectly from better climate variability understanding and prediction. It is expected that near real time access to the upstream observations from NACO will be crucial to long term forecasts (longer than a few days) for the Barents Sea and the Arctic in general. Oceanographic variability at the mid-Norwegian shelf is also of considerable interest to offshore oil and gas operators in the area.

The number of Norwegian and international scientific users, industrial and public users can be split into two types:
i) users who contribute to design of individual measurement campaigns, and
ii) those who use the observational data in their own research or other activity but do not decide sampling schemes.

In the first category there are primarily scientists in physical oceanography and climate plus a few industrial users. In the second category we expect ecosystem researchers, polar scientists more generally, paleoclimate scientists, industry including value-adding forecast services, and public users.

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