North Pole Station: A Distributed Long-Term Environmental Observatory

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The research project will establish a Long-Term Observatory at the North Pole by installing an oceanographic mooring, launching a drifting buoy, and conducting repeated oceanographic transects for temperature and salinity. Oceanographic observations at the sites will be used to examine the long-term variability of the ocean and atmosphere in an area that has been undergoing rapid changes during the past decade. The current warming trend may presage a melting of the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover that has been predicted from Global Circulation Models as a response to global warming. Determination of the variability and a possible long-term trend in ocean temperature or salinity is critical to understanding the oceanographic response to climate change in the Arctic Ocean and could provide compelling evidence to support other observations in the Arctic that global warming has already begun.