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International Polar Year 2007–2008 - WMO

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Fig. 2.2-4. Distribution<br />

of the oceanographic<br />

stations over the<br />

Arctic Ocean for<br />

the summer period<br />

according to the<br />

findings of the<br />

Environmental<br />

Working Group (EWG,<br />

1997).<br />

160<br />

IPY 20 07–20 08<br />

programme that will generate the new insights that<br />

IPY set out to provide.<br />

Instrumenting the Western Arctic: the 2008<br />

voyage of F/S <strong>Polar</strong>stern ARK-XXIII/3 (ECDAMOCLES).<br />

This cruise, from 12 August to 17 October 2008, was<br />

designed as a contribution to the Synoptic Pan-Arctic<br />

Climate and Environment Study (SPACE), designed<br />

by Ursula Schauer (AWI) for IPY, but with input from a<br />

range of multinational programs including, principally,<br />

EC-DAMOCLES. The cruise was remarkable for its<br />

geographic scope (from the NW to the NE Passage), for<br />

the international breadth of its collaborations and for the<br />

range of novel instrumentation that it deployed across<br />

this climatically-active sector of the western Arctic. These<br />

novel systems included the first two deployments of the<br />

<strong>Polar</strong> Area Weather System (PAWS; Metocean; Burghard<br />

Brümmer, UHH) designed to collect air temperature, ice<br />

temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity,<br />

wind speed and direction, and position, with one-year<br />

life; two WHOI Ice-tethered Platforms (ITP; John Toole and<br />

Richard Krishfield, WHOI); five Surface Velocity Profilers<br />

(SVP; Meteo France; Pierre Blouch, EUROMETNET Brest)<br />

providing ice-top position, temperature and pressure;<br />

two <strong>Polar</strong> Ocean Profiler buoys (POPS, JAMSTEC, Takashi<br />

Kikuchi); ice-tethered systems providing profiles of<br />

water temperature, salinity and pressure to 1000 m;<br />

and a single Ice-tethered Acoustic Current Profiler (ITAC;<br />

Optimare + RDI 75 kHz Long Ranger ADCP; Jean-Claude<br />

Gascard of DAMOCLES) – essentially an ice-tethered<br />

ADCP providing profiles of ocean current velocity to<br />

500m every two hrs – employing Kikuchi’s system of 2<br />

GPS units placed some 100m apart to obtain not only<br />

position, but also the orientation of the ice floe in areas<br />

of weak horizontal field strength.<br />

Revolutionizing the hydrographic record of the<br />

Arctic Deep Basins: the contribution of Ice tethered<br />

Profiler systems. Of the many new systems that have<br />

revolutionized the Arctic Ocean data set in recent years,<br />

a principal success has been the rapid expansion of CTD<br />

coverage throughout the Arctic deep basins, provided<br />

largely by the autonomous use of ice-tethered profiler<br />

systems. The two main types are the WHOI ITP system<br />

(Krishfield et al., 2008) and the JAMSTEC POPS (Inoue<br />

and Kikuchi, 2007; Kikuchi et al., 2007).<br />

The rapid expansion of the ITP system since 2004,<br />

but principally during IPY, is documented in Table 2.2-<br />

3 (next page). It is now a fully-international effort with<br />

contributions from the EC-DAMOCLES and with IPY collaborations<br />

between WHOI and AWI, Arctic and Antarctic<br />

Research Institute (AARI, St Petersburg), French <strong>Polar</strong><br />

Institute (IPEV), Shirshov Institute of Oceanography<br />

and the U.K. Arctic Synoptic Basin-wide Oceanography<br />

(ASBO) project. In 2008, in collaboration with Canadian,<br />

U.K., Russian and German colleagues, the WHOI team<br />

collectively deployed a dozen systems from the Borneo<br />

ice camp near the N. Pole (1), the Louis St.Laurent in the<br />

Canada Basin (five systems) and well upstream in the<br />

Transpolar Drift from the Fedorov (4) and <strong>Polar</strong>stern (2).<br />

Since April 2006, the <strong>Polar</strong> Ocean Profiler (POPS) has<br />

used a similar system with an inductive modem providing<br />

data transfer between ice platform and profiler.<br />

Trials confirm that POPS can measure temperature and<br />

salinity with conservative accuracies better than 0.01 C<br />

for temperature and 0.01 for salinity.

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