Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The world has turned its attention to the Arctic, largely because of a rapidly changing climate, with the loss of sea ice being a major consequence of our warming planet. Climate change and globalization both contribute to the unprecedented challenges and opportunities faced by the Arctic. Canada must create the knowledge upon which sustainable development, adaptation, and mitigation strategies can be based. Satellite data, in situ observations, and Inuit knowledge have all documented the rapid thinning and retreat of Arctic sea ice. These changes have a profound impact on the global energy balance with the potential to influence large-scale weather and ocean circulation, polar ecosystems and marine biogeochemistry, livelihoods of coastal communities, marine navigation, and resource extraction. Political, economic, and social development programs are already well underway, often ahead of the multi-sectoral governance and policy required to support sustainable development principles. My NSERC Discovery Grant (DG) long-term objectives are to understand how the atmosphere and ocean force sea ice dynamic and thermodynamic processes and to elucidate key biogeochemical implications of changes in these processes. To accomplish this, I intend to examine these interacting systems at a range of space and time scales, taking advantage of in situ experimentation, model development, and a cycle of hypothesis formation, testing, and reformulation. Over the course of this NSERC DG cycle I intend to examine four short-term objectives: 1.Sea Ice Processes - Examine the role of micro- to hemispheric-scale oceanic and atmospheric forcing (in both space and time) of sea ice dynamic and thermodynamic processes using in situ observations, remote sensing, and numerical models. 2. Ice Hazards - Investigate the processes controlling sea ice and glacier dynamics and how this relates to changes in ice hazards in rapidly expanding Arctic marine shipping lanes. 3. Teleconnections - Investigate the role that increasing open water has on surface atmosphere pressure patterns in association with observed changes in large-scale sea ice circulation. Examine these teleconnections over both contemporary and paleoclimate time scales (mid-Holocene forward). 4. Technology - Continue to refine techniques to estimate the geophysical and thermodynamic state of the snow/sea ice system using microwave scattering and emission observations, and electro-thermophysical models. Relate this work to direct detection and quantification of melt fluxes from sea ice, detection of oil and other transportation-related contaminant spills in sea ice, and on detection of young ice forms involved in bromine-release processes across the ocean-sea ice-atmosphere (OSA) interface. The Arctic represents both a challenge and an opportunity for Canada and indeed for the world. We are rapidly opening a `third ocean' available for development, yet to do so will require careful stewardship, informed by science.