Synthesis and Integration of Riverine, Oceanic and Sea Ice Tracer/Contaminant Data with High Resolution Coupled Ocean-Sea Ice Models

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This proposal requests funds to evaluate available distributions of a variety of natural and anthropogenic trace substances (transient and steady-state) in terms of their potential to delineate pathways and mean residence times of the Arctic Ocean water masses and its sea ice cover. This information is fundamental for our understanding of the role of the Arctic Ocean and its sea ice cover in regional and global climate, as well as in the redistribution of contaminants in the marine system, and their export from the Arctic Ocean through the water and ice phase. The general approach is to integrate existing tracer and contaminant data sets and to combine results from the synthesis of these integrated data sets with model simulations. Specifically, the investigators plan to check the information derived from several passive tracers (e.g. tritium, oxygen and Helium isotopes) for consistency with hydrographic data and direct current measurements, as well as with tracer distributions simulated by dynamical models. In a second step, the investigators plan to compare this information with measured contaminant distributions to (i) use conservative contaminants as additional tracers of water and sea ice circulation, and (ii) study sources and sinks of non-conservative contaminants through comparison with passive tracers.