AOSB-CliC plan for iAOOS version 2.1 1 The integrated Arctic Ocean Observing System (iAOOS): an AOSB-CliC Observing Plan for the International Polar Year.

• Main Author: Bob Dickson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Rationale and background; To many investigators; the polar reservoirs of ice; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; albedo; International Polar Year; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.553.453; http://arctic.cbl.umces.edu/sbi/web-content/SBE info/AOSB-CLIC_short_plan_v2.2_1.pdf

the polar role in climate414,546. And the climatic impact of Arctic change133,134 is still centred on the fate of the Arctic sea-ice and the climatic and social effects of its disappearance. Many state-of-the-art climate models predict that the perennial sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean will disappear in late summer within a few decades or less. Important questions remain as to whether this expectation is justified607,644, and if so when this change will take place and what effect it will have on climate on a regional-to-global scale546,811. Such a dramatic physical affront to the ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere system in high northern latitudes, corresponding to a change in surface albedo from more than 0.8 to less than 0.3 over a surface larger than Europe, is bound to have radical effects on human activities with immediate impacts on the indigenous inhabitants of the circum-Arctic region and the ecosystem on which they depend, and with widespread effects on socio-economic activity on a hemispheric scale. Since the mid 1990s, observational programs such as EC-VEINS and the pan-