While Arctic shelf seas are nominally ice-covered for ~9 months of the year, due to its mobility, sea ice is a year-round concern for maritime operations in the Alaskan Arctic, including shipping, scientific activities and oil & gas development. Though the use of satellite-tracked buoys and analysis of repeat satellite imagery has significantly advanced our understanding of the large-scale circulation of sea ice in the Arctic over the last several decades, limited spatial resolution and velocity errors in these measurements make estimating differential ice motion due to dynamic processes difficult. Thus our knowledge of small-scale and short-lived ice motions responsible for thickening, opening and dispersion of sea ice is limited. In the coastal zone this gap in understanding is exacerbated by both the complexity of nearshore ice motion and a lack of data due to limited buoy deployments as well as problems with land contamination of satellite data pixels adjacent to the coast. This project will address these knowledge gaps through two primary objectives: 1) develop a set of low-cost satellite-tracked ice drifters 2) test drifters for deploy-ability and cold weather performance. The low-cost nature of these drifters will allow for drifter deployment in the coastal zone in sufficient numbers to overcome current technological limitations that hamper efforts to understand Arctic nearshore zones. In the process of testing the drifters, we will deploy a number of them in clusters on landfast ice and pack ice near Barrow such that we assess their usefulness for providing operational information on sea ice drift, track landfast ice after it detaches from the coast and compute deformation and dispersion statistics for nearshore sea ice.
This project, jointly funded by the UAF Coastal Marine Institute, the North Slope Borough (NSB) and Shell, will develop and test a set of low-cost satellite-tracked ice drifters.
During April 2015 a team of two researchers will deploy a series of buoys approximately 70 nm off the coast from Barrow, AK.
