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type: Concept

ARCTIC SEA ICE PROPERTIES AND P
type: Concept
in scheme: projects
definition: The Arctic sea ice cover is undergoing significant climate-induced changes, resulting in a reduction in ice extent and a net thinning of the sea ice cover. The sea ice cover plays an important role in the global climate system, both as an indicator and an amplifier of environmental change. It is important to continue and expand long-term observations of these changes to improve the fundamental understanding of the role of the sea ice cover in the global climate system and its utility as a climate change indicator. This formidable task spans an extensive range of temporal and spatial scales. An integrated, coordinated, and interdisciplinary approach will be used to monitor the state of the Arctic sea ice cover and investigate its governing processes. There are numerous tools that will be brought to bear on this task, including satellite remote sensing, autonomous rovers, buoys, ocean moorings, field campaigns and numerical models. Satellite remote sensing provides large-scale descriptions of such basic parameters as ice distribution, melt zone, ice motion, and cloud fraction at intervals of half a day to a week. Buoys and moorings will contribute high temporal resolution and can measure parameters currently unavailable from space such as atmospheric fluxes, ice thickness, internal ice temperature, photographs of surface conditions, and ocean temperature and salinity. The fixed observing systems will be complemented by autonomous mobile platforms including aerial vehicles, underwater vehicles, and land vehicles. A coordinated array of such vehicles, with integrated sensor systems, will provide spatial and temporal coverage that has previously been unavailable. Field campaigns will be used to explore, in detail, the state of the ice cover and the processes that govern the ice cover. The campaigns will be pan-Arctic including areas that have been largely unexamined, such as the region north of Greenland. Process studies will examine the interactions of the lower atmosph…