Arctic Shelf Water Processes

In a future climate scenario with no summer sea ice and perennial ice cover, we believe that the Arctic shelves will become the most important ventilation areas with AW as source water. Our data from both warm and cold Arctic shelves around Svalbard and i n the Barents Sea will hence be a perfect basis for further studies of today's shelf processes and future climate scenarios with experienced staff and colleagues at the University of Washington (UW). Our contact persons and different research groups at UW have long experience with sea ice dynamics, state-of-the-art data analysis and remote sensing techniques in polynya areas, and will give valuable input to our data analysis of Storfjorden polynya data (BIAC) and join as co-authors in resulting papers. T he project consists of three main types of activities: - Analysis of data collected around Svalbard, Fram Strait and western Barents Sea through Norwegian funded projects (iAOOS, BIAC, and SIOS) at UNIS together with UW data from the Bering, Chukchi and B eaufort shelves. - Learning state-of-the-art remote sensing techniques for polynya dynamics studies and implementing the Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) for the Storfjorden polynya. - Writing paper with partners at UW by combining the above two items. The research focus and planed paper working titles are: - Slope-shelf exchange processes between AW and ArW as observed by the iAOOS mooring program. - Spatial eddy propagation studies along continental shelves combining simple analytic consideration, observations and numerical model (ROMS). - Wintertime warming of Arctic shelves. - Sea ice monitoring in the western Barents Sea, in situ polynya observations and polynya modeling (BIAC). - Polynya dynamics, ice production and Brine-enriched Shelf Water (BSW) production on Arctic shelves.