2006 Annual Meeting and Arctic Forum | Abstracts

Planning the Barrow Cabled Observatory: Real-Time Oceanographic and Environmental Data for Northern Alaska

Dale N. Chayes¹, Bernard Coakley², Richard Machida³, Andrey Proshutinsky⁴, Thomas Weingartner^5
1Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Instrument Laboratory, 61 Route 9 West, PO Box 1000, Palisades , NY, 10964, USA, Phone 845-365-8434, Fax 845-359-6940, dale@ldeo.columbia.edu
²Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, PO Box 757320, Fairbanks, AK, 99775-7320, USA, Phone 907-474-5385, Fax 907-474-5163, bernard.coakley@gi.alaska.edu
³Office of Information Technology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, PO Box 757700, Fairbanks, AK, 99775-7700, USA, Phone 907-474-7102, Fax 907-474-5910, Richard.Machida@uaf.edu
⁴Department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanograpic Institute, 360 Woods Hole Road, Mail Stop 29, Woods Hole, MA, 02546, USA, Phone 508-289-2796, Fax 508-457-2181, aproshutinsky@whoi.edu
⁵Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, PO Box 757220, Fairbanks, AK, 99775-7220, USA, Phone 907-474-7993, Fax 907-474-7204, weingart@ims.uaf.edu

Study of the Arctic Ocean is limited by sea ice and harsh weather that restrict access using traditional methods for much of each year. This has limited data acquisition in the past and obscured understanding of events, processes and variability of the environment over most of the Arctic Ocean. Breaching this isolation can be achieved through the use of cabled observatory technology and instrumentation to monitor the shelf and basin independent of surface conditions.

Located at the confluence of the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea and the Bering Strait, Barrow, Alaska, is an ideal location both to observe local phenomena and to address mixing issues having global significance. The Beaufort and Chukchi shelves are heterogeneous environments, characterized by complex oceanography that dramatically impacts the local ecosystem and, ultimately, the communities that depend on this ocean. Because this region is particularly sensitive to climatically driven environmental changes, understanding the variability and the linkages between and within the atmosphere and the ocean are necessary to constrain change, to predict how it will evolve over time, and to develop plans to mitigate the consequences to local communities

A design effort to address the science needs and technical issues associated with a cabled observatory at Barrow, Alaska, is well underway. A science workshop was held in Barrow in February 2005 with the results reported in EOS. A technical working group met in Monterey, California, in November 2005 to develop a conceptual design for a cabled seafloor observatory at Barrow. This poster reports on the results of these two workshops.