UpTempO Buoys for Understanding and Predictions
Abstract
Sea ice is retreating more in recent years, resulting in unprecedented warming of the upper Arctic Ocean. The role of this warming on sea ice retreat and advance has been explored quite recently using numerical models, but a lack of observational data limits our confidence in these results. This proposal is designed to gather data on the summer warming and fall cooling of the upper Arctic Ocean, using UpTempO (Upper Temperature of the arctic Ocean) buoys. For this project, we will for the first time build and deploy air-dropped UpTempO buoys. In particular, we seek to determine the state of upper ocean heat at the very start of summer (early June) and then follow its evolution through the following year. This project is a contribution to the SIZRS (Seasonal Ice Zone Reconnaissance Surveys) program to be coordinated by Dr. J. Morison at the University of Washington. SIZRS will take advantage of the Alaskan Coast Guard C130 Arctic Domain Awareness flights to deploy a variety of instruments in the Seasonal Ice Zone (SIZ) of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. We will drop 3 buoys into leads on an ADA flight in early June, and then drop 2 more to fill in buoy network gaps late in the season on a flight in October. We will coordinate other SIZRS data programs with buoy drops and overflights through the summer and fall, in order to place our program into a larger framework. With these data, we seek to better understand the correlation length scales of upper ocean temperature in the seasonally ice-free regions of the western Arctic Ocean, including how these correlations depend on geography and environmental conditions. We will provide our data to users such as modelers and large-scale gridded SST data producers for validation activities, both in raw form, in standardized level format, and in the context of a multi-platform database we will create for this project.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 28, 2016
- Accession Number
- AD1041492
Entities
People
- Michael Steele
Organizations
- University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory