| Summary: | Collaborators from five institutions worked to build and deploy an Arctic Ocean network of rugged and autonomous buoys (named "O-Buoys"), capable of observing three key atmospheric chemical species, bromine monoxide-BrO, ozone-O3, and carbon dioxide-CO2 through 2017 (with each O-Buoy being operational for up to 2 years). O3 and CO2 are two of the most important greenhouse gases that have, as yet, poorly understood behavior in the Arctic. BrO is a reaction intermediate that is involved in the extraordinary ozone and mercury atmospheric depletion that occurs during polar springtime, both of which have strong consequences for human and ecosystem health in the Arctic region. These buoys are immersed through the sea ice into the ocean surface, thereby providing a constant temperature (-1.7 degrees C) environment for sensor stability. The original O-Buoy project funded by NSF included design and testing of the O-Buoy. In the current project, 11 new O-Buoys were constructed and deployed (sometimes twice) along with the four already built. As a pilot project, two of the new O-Buoys included seawater sensors for CO2, oxygen, pH, fluorescence, backscatter, temperature and salinity in addition to the atmospheric O3, BrO, and CO2 sensors. Throughout the project, data from each O-Buoy were subject to QA/QC protocols by automated processing initially, with preliminary data available on a regular basis on the NSF Arctic Data Center site. All final data and metadata are ultimately archived on Arctic Data after final analysis at the end of each deployment (please search under O-Buoy, Matrai and/or Simpson). This network of O-Buoys, coordinated and clustered with other buoys in ice based observatories, enabled the scientific community to first observe and, next, better understand the impact of Arctic surface change on atmospheric composition and chemistry. Outreach was done to many K-silver organizations. Video footage from deployments/recoveries and interviews with colleagues and native Arctic people were contributed to the http://www.arcticstories.net site, the Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project ( http://www.whoi.edu/beaufortgyre/expeditions ), the Nansen and Amundsen Basins Observational System (NABOS-II, http://research.iarc.uaf.edu/NABOS2/ ), and the O-Buoy web site ( http://www.o-buoy.org/ ).
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