The Russian invasion of Ukraine has halted most of the scientific cooperation with Western countries. Last Monday, an analysis published in Nature Climate Change showed that the monitoring of climate change in the Arctic is less accurate in the absence of Russian data.
The Arctic is warming two to four times faster than the global average. Data on climate change in this region is therefore important for our understanding of the trajectory of global warming. Scientists used model data from the INTERACT international network of Arctic research stations to see how accurate the data were with or without those from the Russian stations.
They conclude that even with the Russian stations, the data are not fully representative of the entire Arctic region. Omitting Russian data makes this bias worse, for example, because there is no information on what is happening in the Siberian taiga forest. This means predictions on how the global climate will develop this century will be less accurate.
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01903-1
