Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Funds are requested to purchase meteorological buoys and one weather, radiation, and ice mass balance station to be deployed on sea ice floes to track ice motion, to observe meteorological conditions, and to study thermodynamic ice growth and snow accumulation. The requested instrumentation is essential to support long-term in-situ and satellite observations of the sea ice mass balance in the Arctic Ocean. These observations are the key component of a comprehensive research program carried out at the University of Alberta since 2004 to study changes of Arctic sea ice, in particular changes of ice thickness, in relation to variations of other climate parameters, by means of in-situ, airborne, satellite remote sensing and modeling work. The main study area is the region of thick multi-year ice of the Arctic Ocean between the coast of Canada and the North Pole. However, we will increasingly include the Beaufort Sea and the straits and sounds of the Northwest Passage in our airborne surveys. The research is significant as the areal coverage of Arctic sea ice is strongly decreasing, at a pace much faster than predicted by any climate model. This demonstrates our poor understanding of climate processes and feedbacks in the Arctic. The disagreement can partially be explained by a misrepresentation of the sea ice mass balance in those models, which is largely due to a general lack of systematic ice thickness observations in the Arctic Ocean. Ice thickness information is also increasingly required to inform decisions and regulations about shipping and offshore resource exploration in ice covered waters. The initiated work is unique worldwide, and will contribute to systematic observations of changes of ice thickness and ice dynamics, and to the establishment of a future collaborative Canadian Arctic Sea Ice Mass Balance Observatory (CASIMBO) by leading Canadian universities and government agencies.