The Unu Mondo Expedition

[Jim Hunt]

The Unu Mondo Expedition set sail for the Arctic from Roscoff in Brittany on July 7th. Their vessel of choice is Northabout, a yacht that has already circumnavigated the Arctic twice, and they have just reached Prince Christian Sound in the south of Greenland:

https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2020/07/northabout-heads-north-again/#Jul-21

The original plan involved sailing the Northwest Passage this summer, but Covid-19 constraints mean that has been delayed until next year. This year the expedition's aim is to:

Gather scientific data and testimonies from local communities in the villages of the West coast of Greenland to better anticipate climate change and promote concrete actions.

[Freegrass]

Great you opened a thread about this project Jim. I was thinking about doing it when I first heard about it last week in our Belgian media, but what do I know? Better to leave it up to specialist like you.

My most favorite part of this mission is the Katabata project. There's a lot of potential there for renewable energy.

Our expedition hosts the KATABATA project, a scientific project set up by researchers from the University of Liège (Belgium), which aims to measure for the first time the potential of the katabatic winds in the south of Groenland with the aim of being able to set up large wind farms there. This project, which is anchored in the energy transition, consists of the installation of 3 meteorological stations which will allow, during three years, to model and analyse the power of the winds recorded in the south of the country.

[Jim Hunt]

My most favorite part of this mission is the Katabata project. There's a lot of potential there for renewable energy.

Quite so!

https://www.katabata-project.uliege.be/cms/c_5785933/en/katabata-scientific-project

These observations of wind speed at 10 meters, collected every 15 minutes and retransmitted by satellite to ULiège, will enable :

• Validation of the capacity of the MAR model (developed by ULiège) to simulate strong winds and their temporal variability at the 15min scale.
  
• The construction of a robust climatology model of these katabatic winds in order to better understand their temporal variability by studying, for example, the katabatic upsurges that increase wind speed from ~100km/h to ~10 km/h in a few minutes and by evaluating the capacity of MAR to represent them,
  
• Calibration of the MAR model to generate wind signals to accurately predict the production of wind turbines installed in Greenland when the model is run in weather forecast mode.
  
• The potential justification, using robust statistics, of the interest of installing large wind farms in Southern Greenland and converting the green energy produced into e-fuels or building a Greenland-Europe electricity connection.
  

ULiège researchers see this project as a unique opportunity to accelerate the energy transition. At the end of the project, the weather stations will be removed by Greenland Guidance, a logistical organization and scientific support to the teams operating in Greenland, which has a boat to access the islands.

The team have also been releasing drifting buoys during their crossing of the North Atlantic. No embeddable video on YouTube yet, but see their Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=910723419433470