Arctic Regional Climate Centre Network becomes WMO Regional Climate Centre for polar regions

It is the first ever WMO Regional Climate Centre (RCC) dedicated to the polar regions, with a special focus on cryosphere related products and services. It is part of a wider drive by WMO to improve climate predictions and services in the Polar regions – including the high mountain Third Pole region given their significance to the rest of the world and the international climate policy agenda. Concerted efforts are currently underway to initiate an Antarctic RCC-Network along with an Antarctic Climate Forum.

The ArcRCC embraces three WMO Regional Associations with a geographical domain covering a vast area within the Arctic Circle - Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russian Federation, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Denmark (Greenland) and Iceland. 

All the eight member states of the Arctic Council are supporting the ArcRCC-Network.
There are three geographically delineated nodes:

• North American Node led by Canada with pan-Arctic Long Range Forecasting function (with USA as a member of consortium) 
• Nordic Node led by Norway with pan-Arctic Climate Data function (with Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden as members of the consortium) 
• Eurasian Node led by the Russian Federation with pan-Arctic Climate Monitoring function

The Training function, which is a mandatory function of WMO RCCs, will be performed as a shared responsibility of all the Arc-RCC-Network Nodes. 

The overall operational coordination of all the nodes is currently provided by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

All the products and services provided by the ArcRCC-Network are accessible through the web portal (https://arctic-rcc.org).