UpTempO: Measuring the Upper Layer Temperature of the Arctic Ocean

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Ice-based buoys exist that can measure temperature profiles, but these are not optimized for observing the open sea. Thus the objective of this proposal is to fill this gap in the Arctic Observing Network measurement strategy, i.e., to measure the time history of summer warming and subsequent fall cooling of the seasonally open water areas of the Arctic Ocean. The PIs will focus on those areas with the greatest ice retreat, i.e., the northern Beaufort, Chukchi, East Siberian, and Laptev Seas. Their method will be to build up to 10 relatively inexpensive ocean thermistor string buoys per year, to be deployed in the seasonally ice-free regions of the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic-ADOS (Autonomous Drifting Ocean Station) buoy will float at the ocean surface, equipped with (i) a sea level pressure sensor, (ii) a 50 m long string of 11 thermistors, and (iii) a high precision conductivity/temperature pair at 5 m depth on some buoys for thermistor calibration. Data will be recorded every 2 hours and downloaded in near real time via ARGOS satellite to the web site of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP). Daily average and vertically interpolated data (to 1 m bins) will also be provided on the IABP website, and will be sent to data archives (CADIS and NODC). The PIs will also work with scientists at mission-oriented agencies to better incorporate ocean surface data into their global products such as Sea Surface Temperature analyses. Real-time data will also be made available to the operational community via the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). Buoy deployment will use existing assets such as C130 aircraft coordinated by the National Ice Center (NIC), ship cruises planned as part of other projects, and springtime ice surveys conducted by other projects and/or by the U.S. Navy north of Alaska.