Yanling Yu
Jim Maskanik
Elixabeth Cassano
Hajo Eicken
Jia Wang
Xuexhi Bai
Josh Jones

Yanling is a researcher at the Polar Science Center, University of Washington. As the lead investigator of the project, her interests are to understand the long-term variation of arctic landfast ice and its responses to the storm activities. She is also collaborating with other investigators on this project to explore model simulation of landfast ice along the Beaufort coast, including its interannual variability and short-term responses to coastal passing storms. Such a model simulation will be the first kind, coupling between the Polar Weather and Research Forecast (WRF) and a high-resolution coastal coupled ice-ocean model (CIOM).

Jim is a Research Professor within the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, and is affiliated with CU's Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR; http://ccar.colorado.edu/main.html), Research Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV), and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). His work as part of the project focuses on investigating how variations in landfast ice are affected by sea ice motion, offshore pack-ice conditions and large-scale atmospheric circulation. Of particular interest is gaining an understanding of how changes in these factors might affect the future growth, stability and extent of landfast ice.

Liz is an Associate Scientist in CIRES (http://cires.colorado.edu) at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her work and interest in this project involves characterizing and understanding cyclones in the area of study. Polar WRF is being used to simulate cyclones over the time period of study, the output of which is being used to force the coupled ocean-ice model run by Jia Wang's group. Other work being done involves trying to understand changes in wind speeds at several coastal locations in our area of study.

Hajo is a Professor of Geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and leads the UAF contribution to this project. He and his team are interested in understanding the processes that govern the seasonal cycle of landfast ice. They pay particular attention to local knowledge and uses of the ice cover as relevant in the context of this project.

Jia Wang is a research scientist at NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), Ann Arbor, Michigan. His research interests include Arctic and Great Lakes climate, and ice-ocean-ecosystem modeling. As the co-PI of the project, his task is to examine the long-term variation of arctic landfast ice and its responses to the storm activities using the Coupled Ice-Ocean Model (CIOM). His role is to collaborate with PIs and co-PIs on this project to 1) explore model simulation of landfast ice along the Beaufort coast, including its interannual variability and short-term responses to coastal passing storms using both NCEP and the Polar Weather and Research Forecast (WRF) forcings, 2) test hypotheses associated with landfast ice variability in response to storm activities, and 3) improve CIOM's capability in simulating landfast ice.

Josh is a graduate student working on a Master’s Degree in Geophysics under Dr. Hajo Eicken.  His thesis involves the formation of and break-out events occurring to landfast sea ice along the coast of Barrow, Alaska, along with the atmospheric and oceanic conditions contributing to these processes.