The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas include the vast

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: Key words; circulation; sea ice; fast ice; Beaufort Sea; coupled ice-ocean model; Pacific; Chukchi; Sea ice; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.499.4034; http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2008/20080047.pdf

The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas include several important hydrological features: inflow of the Pacific water, Alaska coast current (ACC) , the seasonal to perennial &ea ice cover, and landfast ice along the Alal'kan coast. The dynamics of this coupled ice-ocean sys-tem is important for both regional scale oceanography and large--scale global climate change research. A number of moorings were de-ployed in the area by JAMSI'EC since 1992, and the data revealed highly variable characteristics of the hydrological environment. A re-gional high-resolution coupled ice-ocean model of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas was established to simulate the ice-ocean environment and unique seasonallandfast ice in the coastal Beaufort Sea. The model results reproduced the Beaufort gyre and the ACe. The depth-averaged annual mean ocean currents along the Beaufort Sea coast and shelf break compared well with data from four moored ADCPs, but the simulated velocity had smaller standan:l deviations, which indicate small-scale eddies were frequent in the region. The model re-sults captured the seasonal variations of sea ice area as compared with remote sensing data, and the simulated sea ice velocity showed an almost stationary area along the Beaufort Sea coast that was similar to the observed landfast ice extent. It is the combined effects of the weak oceanic current near the coast, a prevailing wind with an onshore component, the opposite direction of the ocean current, and