Abstracts

In recent years, ice-tethered drifters with discrete subsurface instrumentation, including the SALARGOS, IOEB and J-CAD buoys, have been successfully fielded in the Arctic. These instruments demonstrate that automated buoys are a viable means of acquiring long-term, in situ data from beneath the ice pack. However, the vertical resolution of the temperature and salinity observations from these systems has typically been limited to only a few depths due to the costs associated with outfitting multiple sensors on a single package. Even with limited sensors, total system costs has meant that only a small number of such devices have been fielded at any one time. Building on the successful Moored Profiler technology, we propose to develop an automated, long-lived, ice-tethered buoy capable of returning daily high-vertical-resolution profiles of upper ocean temperature and salinity in the Arctic Ocean during all seasons over several years. Our design requirements are:
1) to return in real time, 1-m-vertical-resolution, high-accuracy temperature and salinity profiles to at least 500 m depth for three years (assuming deployment in robust ice floes),
2) to be deployable from light aircraft (Twin Otters) and helicopters through a conventional 16" ice-auger hole, and
3) to be modestly priced allowing them to be considered disposable. Ultimately we envision a loose array of these ice-tethered profilers being maintained throughout the Arctic Ocean to observe the annual and interannual variations of the upper ocean: the Arctic extension of the international ocean observing system.