Project Summary Dynamics and Forcing of Nares Strait from 2003-09: Tidal to Interannual Variability to the West of Greenland

• Main Author: Helga S. Huntley
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Canada; Greenland; Nares; Nares strait; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.610.3981; http://muenchow.cms.udel.edu/papers/nares2010nsfam.pdf

Intellectual Merit This proposal seeks support to test the hypothesis that the dynamics of Nares Strait is in a state of transition as the season of landfast ice cover diminishes. To do so, we propose to analyze a comprehensive 6-year data set from an array of moored ocean current, salinity, temperature, sea level, and subsurface pressure sensors, as well as ice thickness observations. The data originate from an unprecedented, high-risk, but ulti-mately successful 2003-2009 Canada-US observational program that took place in Nares Strait, a major pathway of Arctic waters into the North Atlantic to the west of Green-land. We propose to describe and explain the temporally and spatially varying regimes of kinematics and dynamics within this energetic channel. As oceanic fields are forced by vertical and horizontal boundary layer physics at the ice-water, air-water, and ice-air interfaces, the program includes synthesis of data from a meteorological modeling, a remotely-sensed ice (MODIS), and an ice modeling (CICE) component. The moored array was deployed in 2003, serviced in 2006 and 2007, and finally recov-ered in 2009. Münchow and Melling (2008) and Rabe et al. (2010) present first results on the depth-averaged ocean currents and vertical stratification of salinity and temperature