This project will provided for the design, development, and implemention of a component of an Arctic Ocean Observing System in the Switchyard region of the Arctic Ocean (north of Greenland and Nares Strait) that will serve the scientific studies developed for the IPY (International Polar Year), SEARCH (Study of Environmental ARctic Change), and related programs. Specifically, the project will continue and expand two aircraft-based sections between Alert and the North Pole for long-term observation of hydrographic properties and a set of tracers aimed at resolving relative age structure and freshwater components in the upper water column.

Accurate fields of Arctic surface air temperature (SAT) are needed for climate studies, but a robust gridded data set of SAT of sufficient length is not available over the entire Arctic. We plan to produce authoritative SAT data sets covering the Arctic Ocean from 1901 to present, which will be used to better understand Arctic climate change.

The Bering Strait is the only Pacific gateway to the Arctic. Since 1990, under various funding, APL-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.

Part of the BEST (Bering Sea Ecosystem Study) Project, this study will use high-resolution modeling of Bering Sea circulation to understand past change in the eastern Bering climate and ecosystem and to predict the timing and scope of future change.

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.

The extent of arctic sea ice during the summer has declined to near-record minima during the last several summers. Can we predict future minima? Our weekly to seasonal forecasts provided by the National/Naval Ice Center help residents and navigators in the Arctic make better decisions regarding sea ice.

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.

The participants of the IABP work together to maintain a network of drifting buoys in the Arctic Ocean to provide meteorological and oceanographic data for real-time operational requirements and research purposes including support to the World Climate Research Programme and the World Weather Watch Programme.

Students from the Art Institute of Seattle joined APL-UW polar scientists in Barrow, Alaska, to document experiments on the land-fast ice. AIS created a video, The Life of Sea Ice, for APL-UW educational outreach.

The observatory is staffed by an international research team that establishes a camp at the North Pole each spring to take the pulse of the Arctic Ocean and learn how the world's northernmost sea helps regulate global climate.

A gridded ocean climatology has been created that merges the 1998 version of the World Ocean Atlas with the regional Arctic Ocean Atlas. The result is a global climatology for temperature and salinity including a good description of the Arctic Ocean and its environs.

The focus of this project is to synthesize existing studies and data relating to Arctic Ocean primary production and its changing physical controls such as light, nutrients, and stratification, and to use this synthesis to better understand how primary production varies in time and space and as a function of climate change.

We compare the observations of arctic sea ice thickness estimates from satellites with in situ observations – collected by submarine cruises and moorings under the sea ice, by direct measurement during field camps, by electromagnetic instruments flown over the sea ice, and by buoys drifting with the sea ice – to provide a careful assessment of our capabilities to monitor the thickness of sea ice.

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 to 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.

The Shelf-Basin-Interaction program of NSF investigates the processes of transfer and interaction between the ocean shelves, slopes, and deep basins. Here the focus region is the shelf/slope/basin region of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic.

SEARCH is an interagency effort to understand the nature, extent, and future development of the system-scale change presently seen in the Arctic. These changes are occuring across terrestrial, oceanic, atmospheric, and human systems.

The liquid brine filled space in sea ice is where processes of crystal growth and microbial life interact in a sensitive thermodynamical equilibrium between solid matter, liquid, and solutes. Some organisms are capable of manipulating this equilibrium to their ecological advantage with detectable changes of the sea ice micro- and macro- physical properties.

The AOMIP science goals are to validate and improve Arctic Ocean models in a coordinated fashion and investigate variability of the Arctic Ocean and sea ice at seasonal to decadal time scales, and identify mechanisms responsible for the observed changes. The project's practical goals are to maintain and enhance the established AOMIP international collaboration to reduce uncertainties in model predictions (model validation and improvements via coordinated experiments and studies); support synthesis across the suite of Arctic models; organize scientific meetings and workshops; conduct collaboration with other MIPs with a special focus on model improvements and analysis; disseminate findings of AOMIP effort to broader communities; and train a new generation of ocean and sea-ice modelers.

This work will investigate the historical and contemporary changes of arctic sea ice, water column, and aspects of the marine ecosystem as an integrated entity, and project future changes associated with a diminished arctic ice cover under several plausible warming scenarios.