Taking the pulse of an ocean: Polar station monitors Arctic

Researchers’ data will help in understanding of global warming

In Seattle it’s pleasant summer weather, and other parts of the United States are experiencing triple-digit temperatures. At the North Pole it’s a balmy 29 degrees.

Check the latest temperature at the pole for yourself at the Applied Physics Laboratory’s Web site. Information is updated every two to three hours from an automated station installed this spring by an international research team led by the APL.

James Morison, a principal oceanographer at the APL and lead researcher for the “North Pole Automated Station” project, said the team deployed floating buoys this season and will, in coming years, anchor devices to the ocean floor to collect data on everything from the salinity of the water to the thickness of the ice cover.

The work is part of a five-year, $3.9 million project funded by the National Science Foundation to take the pulse year round of the Arctic Ocean and learn how the world’s northernmost sea helps regulate global climate change.

Because the North Pole sits in the middle of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean far from shore facilities, measurements have only been made sporadically from manned drifting stations and isolated drifting buoys.

Even with submarines and powerful icebreakers, surveys of the area are difficult, Morison says. The team combined equipment and techniques developed during the past 30 years to install a prototype, automated “station” comprised of several separate drifting buoys. Instruments measure such things as wind speed, solar radiation and temperature at the surface, as well as taking temperature profiles of the ice and monitoring conditions in the top 250 meters (825 feet) of the ocean. The station was developed to be flexible so instruments from other investigators can be added in the future.

Setting up a monitoring station on the Arctic Ocean is no small undertaking. In the top photo, one of the planes that carried the researchers in is seen on the ice. Below that is a view of some of the gear needed to keep things going. In the bottom photo, UW researchers James Morison and Dean Stewart are dressed for some time at the North Pole, where they helped install instruments at the new station.

Three APL polar veterans - Morison, logistics expert Andy Heiberg and field engineer Dean Stewart - were among those traveling to the Arctic to install the station. From Canada they flew aboard Twin Otter planes for three and a half hours to reach the North Pole where they landed on the ice. A rudimentary camp was set up for several days while holes were drilled in the ice, the drifting buoys were installed and measurements taken of ocean conditions.

The researchers expect the buoys to gradually drift with the ice away from the North Pole toward Fram Strait at the northeast corner of Greenland. Buoys will be redeployed at the pole over several seasons.

Developing the program with Morison were APL polar scientists Knut Aagaard, Dick Moritz and Mike Steele, APL affiliate scientist Miles McPhee and researchers from the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab in Seattle and Oregon State University. The work was carried out with assistance from the Canadian Forces Station Alert in Nunavut, Canada.

The new automated station comes at a time when scientists have observed a rapid thinning of sea ice and shifts in ocean circulation in the Arctic, according to Mike Ledbetter of the NSF’s Arctic Systems Science program. These changes are related to a pattern of change in the atmospheric circulation of the Northern Hemisphere - known as the Arctic Oscillation - which is roughly centered at the Pole.

The Arctic Ocean circulation and the flowing of waters from the Arctic into the Greenland Sea affect the deep overturning circulation of the Atlantic Ocean and thus play an important role in regulating climate, Ledbetter says. ¶

Sandra Hines, News & Information