Announcement of Opportunity
Joint Russian-American Long-term Census of the Arctic (RUSALCA)
Research Program in the Bering and Chukchi Seas
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR)
Proposal Deadline: 14 April 2006
The complete Announcement of Opportunity, including more detailed
instructions for proposal submission are available at the CIFAR website:
http://www.cifar.uaf.edu
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), through its
Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR), requests proposals
for participation in a joint U.S.-Russia research program in the Bering
and Chukchi Seas, focused on sampling and instrument deployment in both
U.S. and Russian territorial waters. This activity is known as the
Russian-American Long-term Census of the Arctic (RUSALCA), and operates
under the auspices of two Memoranda of Understanding between NOAA and,
respectively the Russian Academy of Sciences and Roshydromet. The
RUSALCA objectives are to support NOAA's Climate Observation and
Analysis Program and a Russian interagency Federal Target Program "World
Ocean." RUSALCA also provides some of the arctic components of
international and national climate observing systems including GEOSS,
GCOS, and IOOS. RUSALCA has also contributed to the U.S. interagency
Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) Program, NOAA's Office of
Ocean Exploration, and the Census of Marine Life (CoML).
The RUSALCA program is focused on gathering long-term observations
towards understanding the causes and consequences of the reduction in
sea ice cover in the Northern Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea in the
Arctic Ocean. The program began in summer 2004 with a multi-disciplinary
cruise to investigate water column physics, nutrient chemistry, pelagic
and benthic biology, methane flux and baseline arctic atmospheric
chemistry. Oceanographic moorings were deployed in the western portion
of the Bering Strait in 2004. These moorings were recovered and
redeployed in 2005 and another servicing is scheduled for 2006. A
limited number of CTD and benthic biology stations were completed in
2005 and are planned for 2006. For 2007 and beyond, NOAA and CIFAR
intend to continue the RUSALCA Program with an annual cruise focused on
physics in the Bering Strait region. It is anticipated that a
multi-disciplinary and geographically more extensive cruise will be
sponsored every 2 to 4 years, in the Northern Bering and Chukchi Seas
depending on resources.
RUSALCA is supported by the Climate Observations and Analysis Program of
NOAA. The primary goal of this program is to develop climate-quality
observations, and associated data ingest, archiving, and dissemination
systems. To become a continuing part of the NOAA Climate Observations
and Analysis Program, RUSALCA must be a source of long-term
climate-quality data, suitable for climate change detection and
modeling. There should be a continuing analysis component that produces
regular updates. This announcement seeks proposals to provide temporal
extension to the established mooring program and to other established
multi-disciplinary ocean climate observations, and also to develop a
model-based analysis capability.
The availability of funding from NOAA will be limited and dependent on
FY2007 and beyond appropriations. Based on recent funding levels, NOAA
expects to make no more than 10 awards from this announcement. The
proposal deadline is 14 April 2006. Proposals should assume a start date
of 1 April 2007 and a duration of no more than 5 years.
Because RUSALCA is a collaboration between the United States and the
Russian Federation, U.S. investigators are encouraged to seek
collaborations with scientists from the Russian Federation, and to seek
cost-sharing whenever possible.
The complete Announcement of Opportunity, including more detailed
instructions for proposal submission are available at the CIFAR website:
http://www.cifar.uaf.edu