CIRFA Seminar April 17 by Polona Itkin (UiT)

Welcome to a CIRFA seminar on MOSAiC winter experience – field work impressions and early results organized by the Earth observation group at UiT and CIRFA.

WHEN: April 17, 2020 from 14:00 to 15:00
WHERE: Online: https://connect.uninett.no/cirfa-seminar

Welcome!

MOSAiC winter experience – field work impressions and early results

MOSAiC is an international research expedition that stared end of September 2019 from Tromso and it is currently planned to last to October 2020. The main objective of the expedition is to collect the data on sea ice, ocean, atmosphere, bio-geo-chemical cycles and ecosystem across a full seasonal cycle of the Arctic Ocean. These data will facilitate process studies of Arctic climate system that is undergoing a major climate change. The same data will also support validation and development of new satellite remote sensing sensors, techniques as well as numerical models. Location-wise, the research is concentrated around German research ice breaker Polarstern that has been frozen into the Arctic pack ice in October 2019 in the Northern Laptev Sea and is currently drifting with the ice across the Transpolar drift towards the Fram Strait. To make this ambitious intentional expedition with participants from 20 countries feasible, its 12-month total duration was divided into 5 legs, each lasting approximately 2 months. From 15 December 2019 to 6 March 2020, Polona Itkin, UiT/CSU joint the expedition. During that time Polarstern drifted from 86.62 N, 117.96 E to 88.10 N, 30.82 E, covering roughly 500 km track over the Arctic Ocean. The multitude of measurements e.g. 10 transects of sea ice thickness and snow depth of several km each, 8 dedicated ice coring sessions, 140 snow pits, 23 airborne studies of surface elevation and thermal IR images were collected. In this talk you will learn about the logistics of the expedition, conditions in which the data was collected and some of the early results regarding the snow and ice in the observatory.