| Summary: | This project will continue deployment of Autonomous Ocean Flux Buoys (AOFB) in the Central Arctic and to extend deployment to the Western Arctic on ice floes with co-located instruments measuring temperature/salinity (T/S) profiles, ice fluxes and surface forcing including atmospheric bulk fluxes and radiative terms. Observations of vertical fluxes of heat, salt and momentum between the ocean interior and surface are important to our understanding and modeling of processes that maintain perennial ice cover in the Arctic, particularly at a time of such rapid changes in ice coverage and volume. The Ocean Flux Buoy program will integrate into the long term objectives of the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) and the Arctic Observation Network (AON) by cooperatively deploying the flux buoys with co-located complementary observation systems. This will be achieved through deployments at the North Pole Environmental Observatory (NPEO) and the central Arctic basin through ship deployments in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Ice Tethered profiler program.
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