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The Workshop on pathways to climate-aware advice (WKCLIMAD) met in the autumn of 2021 to develop a proposal for an advisory framework that accounts for the influences of climate change on aquaculture, fisheries, and ecosystems. The workshop worked through online sessions with over 40 participants.Climate-informed advice should be provided through a risk-based framework that considers magnitude and likelihood of impacts, effectiveness and feasibility of measures. A wealth of data, tools and methods exists to on-ramp the advice. However, it is important to consider how these are utilised. To provide robust climate-informed advice, there is a need to identify and rank climate impacts and the associated risks, and match adaptation measures with public policy objectives. There must be a balance between actionable advice and reporting of uncertainty.The next steps for ICES should be to evaluate these three recommended additions to the advice framework/principles:• Development of a framework for spatial knowledge and advice, that includes definitions of temporal and spatial scale of management challenges.• Proactive solicitation of experts and stakeholders in relevant fields. Co-production of knowledge with iterative feedback, accounting for the plurality of knowledge and participation mechanisms.• Formulation of a plan for outputs, and communication, from the start of process, including allocation of sufficient resources to deliver advice.Greater emphasis needs to be placed on the communication and co-creation of advice.Climate-informed advice should include an assessment of current conditions in relation to the desired state. This requires not just an evaluation of the current state of the system, but the likely and/or desired future state of the fisheries/aquaculture system. This will also require greater effort on scoping of future scenarios of ecosystem state, and potential management measures for adaptation, and some mitigation. Advice should document the expected effects of specific management actions, giving attention to the potential distribution of management costs and benefits. Advice should be produced in response to requests but also be proactively produced by ICES. WKCLIMAD provides ICES with definitions, language and terminology that align with, and build on, those of the IPCC and calls on ICES to consistently use this terminology. The workshop also provides example lists of drivers, impacts, measures and potential actions.ICES needs to attract expertise from beyond its traditional areas of ecosystem and population dynamics and oceanography. Engagement with the plurality of the knowledge base is required, as a mean to refine goals, explore trade-offs between management objectives, as well as to build a common understanding and build knowledge about the system and efficient pathways of action to governance. WKCLIMAD considered that to provide credible climate-informed advice, the evidence base needs to be strengthened in the following scientific fields:• future scenarios of management options and ecosystem state• risk, vulnerability and resilience analysis of species, ecosystems, and human communities• spatial planning information and models• trade-offs among potential actions, and incentives for best practice sharing including technological developments• carbon accounting across the system• monitoring and early-warning systems

Ocean warm and saline Atlantic water (AW) flows northward towards the Arctic. This water crosses the Greenland‐Scotland Ridge in three inflow branches:  the Iceland branch,  the Faroe branch and  the Shetland branch. The first monitoring of these branches was obtained along standard hydrographic sections and in the 1990s these observations were complemented by – at that time the state‐of‐the‐art technology – Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) that could measure ocean currents directly. For many years the ADCPs were the backbone in transport estimates of the inflowing AW, but in order to get reliable estimates, a high number of moorings were necessary which was costly both in consumables and man‐power. Alternative methods were therefore needed. The process to optimise the inflow arrays began several years ago by the integration of Satellite Altimetry data . Over the years, more data have been obtained at the inflow arrays, including new data types, and within Blue‐Action analyses have been performed utilizing the available data in order to optimise the monitoring of the inflow arrays both with respect to cost and in order to produce more accurate estimates of AW volume, heat and salt transports. Resulting from the work undertaken in Blue‐Action, the recommendations for future monitoring the three inflow branches are as follows: Iceland branch: Combined observations from one or two ADCP moorings (including hydrographicobservations at intermediate depth) and four annual hydrographic surveys. Faroe branch: Combined observations from satellite altimetry, one ADCP mooring, three PIES (Pressure Inverted Echo Sounders), one bottom temperature logger and at least three annual hydrographic surveys. Shetland branch: A combination of gridded geostrophic surface velocities from satellite altimetry, at least three annual hydrographic cruises along the section and continued ADCP deployments at key sites (such as in the Shetland slope current).

Presentations given by Blue-Action scientists at a stakeholder engagement event for Scotland, 16th October 2019 at Edinburgh City Chambers. For more information please see www.blue-action.eu, or contact the communications office at hannah.grist@srsl.com.

As oil reserves in established basins become depleted, exploration and production moves towards relatively unexploited areas, such as deep waters off the continental shelf. The Faroe-Shetland Channel (FSC, NE Atlantic) and adjacent areas have been subject to increased focus by the oil industry. In addition to extreme depths, metocean conditions in this region characterise an environment with high waves and strong winds, strong currents, complex circulation patterns, sharp density gradients, and large small- and mesoscale variability. These conditions pose operational challenges to oil spill response and question the suitability of current oil spill modelling frameworks (oil spill models and their forcing data) to adequately simulate the behaviour of a potential oil spill in the area. This article reviews the state of knowledge relevant to deepwater oil spill modelling for the FSC area and identifies knowledge gaps and research priorities. Our analysis should be relevant to other areas of complex oceanography.

This report presents results from an experiment, carried out in 2011-2012 within the EU-THOR project to investigate whether future monitoring of the Atlantic water transport through the Faroe-Shetland Channel might be more efficiently achieved on another section than the traditional Munken-Fair Isle section. The new section is less affected by meso-scale activity and narrower, allowing better horizontal resolution of the mooring array, but the experiment revealed that moving to the new section involved other drawbacks. The experiment also confirmed an earlier conjecture that data from satellite altimetry might provide better estimates of transport variations than estimates based on in situ measurements, solely. Previous efforts to determine the average volume transport of Atlantic water through the channel and its variations have been hampered by lack of information on the thickness variations of the Atlantic layer. Re-evaluating the historical data set, we find that the transport estimates are not significantly affected by assuming that the lower boundary of the Atlantic layer is fixed, equal to the average 5°C-isotherm. Based on the conclusions of this report, we recommend that future in situ monitoring in the channel is re-focused.

From 1994 to 2011, instruments measuring ocean currents (Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers; ADCPs) have been moored on a section crossing the Faroe–Shetland Channel. Together with CTD (Conductivity Temperature Depth) measurements from regular research vessel occupations, they describe the flow field and water mass structure in the channel. Here, we use these data to calculate the average volume transport and properties of the flow of warm water through the channel from the Atlantic towards the Arctic, termed the Atlantic inflow. We find the average volume transport of this flow to be 2.7 ± 0.5 Sv (1 Sv = 106 m3 s–1) between the shelf edge on the Faroe side and the 150 m isobath on the Shetland side. The average heat transport (relative to 0 °C) was estimated to be 107 ± 21 TW (1 TW = 1012 W) and the average salt import to be 98 ± 20 × 106 kg s−1. Transport values for individual months, based on the ADCP data, include a large level of variability, but can be used to calibrate sea level height data from satellite altimetry. In this way, a time series of volume transport has been generated back to the beginning of satellite altimetry in December 1992. The Atlantic inflow has a seasonal variation in volume transport that peaks around the turn of the year and has an amplitude of 0.7 Sv. The Atlantic inflow has become warmer and more saline since 1994, but no equivalent trend in volume transport was observed.

The Blue-Action team presented a webinar on 22nd October 2020 as part of Climateurope #ClimateThursday webinar series on climate services. The topic was "Ocean observations and predictions in response to the climate emergency", including presentations from Barbara Berx (Marine Scotland), Noel Keenlyside (University of Bergen) and Mark R. Payne (DTU).

Presentation by B. Berx to colleagues in Marine Scotland on recent climate change work. The topics covered include: an introduction of climate change, the work of the IPCC and UNFCCC, the current 6th Assessment Report cycle in IPCC and the most recent published report on the physical science basis. The presentation then moved on to include an overview of the role of the ocean in global climate and the importance of sustained ocean observations, the merit of historic records and the knowledge gained from some of Marine Scotland's own sustained ocean observations. Results from the Blue Action project were presented as part of how this knowledge then translates to important information for climate prediction on decadal time scales and how this can inform decision making processes, for example in the area of fisheries management.