Data Sets by Parameter
Under Construction
Data Sets by Project
Bering Strait: Pacific Gateway to the Arctic
The Bering Strait is the only Pacific Gateway to the Arctic. Since 1990, under various funding, UW has been measuring properties of the Pacific inflow using long-term in situ moorings, supported by annual cruises. Data, papers, cruise reports, plans and results are available here.
In the western Arctic Ocean, a complex region of topographic ridges, deeps and plateaus - the "Chukchi Borderland" - is a cross-roads for Pacific Waters entering the Arctic and Atlantic waters circum-navigating the Arctic. This project looks at mooring and hydrographic data from a 2002 Polar Star cruise to the region, inferring water pathways and transformations.
Year-round subsurface moorings are used to study the Arctic throughout the year. PIs Aagaard and Woodgate focus on mooring and other in situ data to address a variety of Arctic questions - including flow of Atlantic and Pacific waters, interactions between the shelves and the deep basins, and the properties of the Arctic Ocean Boundary Current.
Shelf-Basin Interaction in the Chukchi Sea
The Chukchi Sea, at the Pacific entrance to the Arctic, is one of the most productive regions of the world ocean. The throughflow from the Pacific into the Arctic crosses and is modified on this shallow shelf. As part of the interdisciplinary Shelf-Basin Interaction project, using in situ moorings we examine the physical processes defining modification in the Chukchi and how the Chukchi outflows connect to the Arctic ocean.
North Pole Environmental Observatory
Beginning in spring 2000, an international research team supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has conducted annual expeditions each April to the North Pole to take the pulse of the Arctic Ocean and learn how the world's northernmost sea helps regulate global climate. The team establishes a group of un-manned scientific platforms, collectively called an observatory, to record data throughout the remainder of the year on everything from the salinity of the water to the thickness and temperature of the ice cover. This web site contains a variety of data sets and links to collaborators data.
Morphological and Optical Characteristics of the Summer Arctic Sea Ice Cover
This web site was authored by Don Perovich, Tom Grenfell, Bonnie Light, Bruce Elder, Jeremy Harbeck, and Kelly Everhart. It contains the field data from studies of "Morphological and optical characteristics of the summer Arctic sea ice cover" conducted during the 2005 Healy-Oden TransArctic Expedition (HOTRAX). It is intended to provide background on the program, an overview of our observations, and data and metadata. Logs and photographs from the transect are also provided.
Submarine Mean Ice Draft Dataset
Mean sea-ice draft over profile lengths of roughly 50 km are provided along with location and time the data were taken. There are 2203 records spanning 26 years (1975 – 2000) and within a Data Release Area in the central Arctic Ocean. These data make use of all the sea-ice draft data from U.S. Naval submarines existing in the archive of the National Snow and Ice Data Center as of January, 2007. The dataset is described in Rothrock et al. (JGR, 2008) and was used in the analysis presented in that paper. The data are available as a text document and as a pdf document with page headers. We would like to keep users updated on the additions we may make in the dataset. Please notify Mark Wensnahan if you use the data or have questions.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ARC-0453825. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
International Arctic Buoy Program
IABP data sets such as surface air temperature, ice motion, buoy positions, ice velocity fields, etc.
Polar Exchange at the Sea Surface (POLES)
POLES has been active in developing algorithms and data sets. The data sets listed have been created as part of the POLES project or are based on algorithms derived from POLES research.
Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA)
SHEBA Project Office data sets such as surface meteorological data, monthly ice concentration maps, ice station position, velocity, and bathymetry data are available. Links are also available to SHEBA data mangement sites that contain integrated data sets from SHEBA principal investigators. The data covers the physics and processes of ice, feedbacks, ocean, atmosphere during the SHEBA year.
The TIROS-N Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) Polar Pathfinder (Path-P) consists of gridded daily Arctic atmospheric data derived from various NOAA satellites. Designed to address the particular needs of the polar research community, the data set is centered on the North Pole and has been gridded using the Equal-Area Scalable Earth-Grid (EASE-Grid).
Polar Science Hydrographic Climatology (PHC)
This is a gridded (1 x 1 degree) global data set of mean ocean temperature and salinity that includes a high quality representation of the arctic seas. It is created by optimal interpolation of the global WOA (i.e., "Levitus"), the regional AOA from EWG, and original eastern Canadian data from BIO. It is available as annual, seasonal, or monthly means, in the same format as the WOA.
This ice thickness distribution (ITD) is derived from the submarine '97 SHEBA survey. The first column of the data file is the thickness at the lower boundary of a bin (in centimeter), and the second column is the fraction. The time of observation is from 28 September to 1 October 1997. For complete ice draft profiles, their statistics, and the data document, please go to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Click here to download the data* and please send an email to Yanling Yu to let her know. This data can be acknowledged as the following: "This data set was provided by the project 'SCICEX Ice Thickness Distribution Test', under Grant No. OPP-9617343 from the National Science Foundation." Any comments or questions regarding this ITD can be directed to Yanling Yu.
*This is a Version 2 data set with ambiguous zeroes being eliminated from draft profiles.