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Ann (UiT) presenting ISOSCAN to Tromsø Scouts

This week, Ann and Eva have officially kickstarted the 2026 ISOSCAN citizen science snow sampling season from Tromsø.

Building on the foundation established in 2025, we have reconnected with valued partners at the university and with Tromsø Outdoor, who once again demonstrate how local expertise and mobility in Arctic winter landscapes are essential to our citizen science efforts.

At the same time, we are excited to announce new partnerships for 2026. Collaborations are now in place with Tromsø Skiguides and Tromsø Scouts, expanding both the geographical reach and the ISOSCAN community. In addition, we are currently in dialogue with several other organisations and hope to share further partnership announcements soon.

Meeting our partners face-to-face has been a crucial part of this week’s work. These conversations are not merely logistical; they actively shape and strengthen our sampling design. This co-development ensures that the citizen science component remains both scientifically robust and socially meaningful.

Tromsø sky with northern light

The response in Tromsø has been overwhelmingly positive. We are met with curiosity, openness, and a clear sense that improving hydrological forecasts in a changing climate is seen as both relevant and necessary. For us as researchers, this confirmation matters: ISOSCAN is not just a data collection effort, but a shared investment in better preparedness for a changing climate with floods, droughts, and other extremes across Scandinavia.

We look forward to the coming weeks of sampling — and to continuing to build this growing network of ISOSCAN’ERS across the North.

Text and photos: Eva Duedahl / University of Southern Denmark

The numbers are in – we have the final results from the laboratory for the ISOSCAN citizen science snow and water sampling in 2025 (see result table at the bottom of the page). We are looking at 43 samples in total, and 42 of those have relevant information about time and location with them that makes the data useful for our scientific analysis.

The samples have been taken over a wide range of locations, from the region around Tromsø, to the border regions between Norway and Sweden, to Finse in Southern Norway, and Lillehammer. Elevation ranges from close to sea level up to 1537 m above sea level. One sample was even taken on the top of Gråtinden mountain, only accessible by narrow ridges! Dear ISOSCAN’ers, please sample responsibly and don’t take any risk during the sampling that you would not take anyways!

Your samples will now in a first stage be placed on a map over Scandinavia to document the spatial distribution of isotope values. One aspect that we are looking for is that the values in the results table become more negative as samples are taken further away from the coast – which would support our hypothesis that the snow samples reflect the amount of water removed from the clouds on their way inland.

We thank all ISOSCAN’ers for their great effort in collecting snow samples. Congratulations on getting in a first set of ISOSCAN samples with good quality. We’re now getting ready to scale up our efforts to a larger geographical region, and a longer time scale over the coming winter season (March-April 2026).

Text: Harald Sodemann, photos: Anonymous ISOSCAN’er

Snow (and runoff) samples from ISOSCAN sampled in March-August 2025 and analysed at FARLAB in 2025

selfie of Janne at the meeting in Spain (photo: Janne Liburd)

We are delighted that the mid-term review meeting on 13th November in Spain went really well, and we received very positive feedback from the Water4All Follow-up Secretariat.

A big thanks to Janne Liburd, our former WP1 member, who represented ISOSCAN and delivered a fantastic presentation – truly a collaborative effort from the whole team. The reviewers’ comments were encouraging, and they were especially impressed by our website.

One of the reviewers, Amanda Lofgeen, even said: “All projects should do like we do…” and praised the ISOSCAN website “fantastic and very motivating.”

Well done and congratulations to the entire ISOSCAN team!

Text: Mandy Kong