Recent research activities with the NACO observatory in Fram Strait

Since 2023, the CMRE Climate Change and Security programme has been maintaining the NATO Arctic underwater Climate Observatory (NACO). Built upon CMRE’s previous effort under the Environmental and Operational Effectiveness Programme, the observatory serves to study underwater acoustic noise and physical oceanographic properties. The scope of the observatory is to monitor and study the effect of the Arctic Atlantification process, which is affecting not only its oceanographic characteristics, but also its acoustical ones, and to foster research collaboration in the Arctic. The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and this warming is strongly modifying its weather. The increasing number of extreme wave/wind events in the Arctic Ocean gives an example. In this talk, we discuss our recent research activity integrating oceanographic and acoustic data from the NACO observatory. The investigations are manifold: we provide examples of soundscape investigations describing the influence on the local soundscape of environmental parameters (oceanography, atmospheric forcing),. Preliminary analysis of extreme weather events will be presented. Finally, a recent study on the biophony will be presented, showing that fin and sperm whales are now residing year-round on the continental slope of Svalbard.