Collaborative Research: A Winter Expediton to Explore the Biological and Physical Conditions of the Bering, Chukchi and Southern Beaufort Seas

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Funds are provided to collect baseline winter information on the overwintering physical and biological characteristics of three important Arctic Seas: The Bering Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and the Beaufort Sea. Understanding of seasonality, and particularly winter conditions, in the Arctic is severely limited because of difficulties in accessing these regions during winter and because of limitations to sensor technology that can be deployed on overwintering moorings and ice-tethered profilers/buoys. In particular, understanding of the overwintering strategies of one of the dominant copepod genera, Calanus spp., is not well understood but is critical to ecosystem modeling efforts. This lack of knowledge has compromised our ability to model and to predict Arctic ecosystems, knowledge that is critical to our efforts to understand the potential impacts of ongoing climate change.The PIs propose a 6-week cruise to the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas, in January-February 2010, during which they will conduct physical (hydrography, circulation), chemical (nutrients), and biological (zooplankton, microzooplankton, chlorophyll) sampling. They will describe the hydrography, circulation and aspects of the planktonic and nutrient environments, identifying the overwintering habitat of Calanus spp., determining the condition and activity of Calanus spp. and euphausiids, describing the interconnectedness between species/populations of Calanus and euphausiids in these regions, identifying the transformations of Pacific Water on the Chukchi Shelf, describing off-shelf flow of Pacific Water into the Artic Ocean and the circulation and hydrography of Barrow Canyon, and quantifying the course- and fine-scale vertical distributions of plankton and particles in relation to the vertical structure of the water column.