The atmospheric boundary layer structure and surface-troposphere exchange in the Svalbard area

The NERSC-IAP project capitalizes on the long-term (+15 years) experience with Russian research cooperation at NERSC. It opens a new line of cooperation with the Moscow scientific establishment. Its aim is to tighten cooperation with the leading Russian r esearch institute in area of atmospheric physics and climatology, namely, the Obukhov Institute of the Atmospheric Physics. The Russian partner is Dr. Irina Repina, the head of the laboratory for air-sea interaction, the participant of numerous polar expe ditions to both poles of the planet. The Russian expertise biased the project toward new field observations in Ny Alesund at Svalbard. With such a bias, the NERSC-IAP project will be indispensible to enhance field training of Norwegian Ph.D. students and young researchers. The project scientific basis is well connected to the previous research at NERSC and IAP. The katabatic wind is essential to understand the mountain glacier meteorology of the Arctic and the impact, potentially large owing to its links to Greenland ice melt, of drainage flows. The katabatic winds are often observed but poorly simulated and the mechanisms of the wind generation and channeling are still hotly debated. Better outlook into this mechanism could be obtained only through thoro ugh combination of the new observational studies and modeling. This approach is similar to that opted for by Sandvik and Furevik (2002) at NERSC but with the important difference related to the collection and the use of new observations from the key area of the katabatic wind generation. Russian Academy of Science has significantly contributed to development of the theory and models of the katabatic winds (e.g. Perov and Gutman, 1972; Gutman, 1983). In spite of the reduction of the research activity, IAP still holds the expertise. Besides the data collection and processing, the complementary model studies will be hold to better understand the mechanisms of the katabatic wind generation on a multitude of scales.