High-precision GPS autonomous platforms for sea ice dynamics and physical oceanography

• Main Authors: Elosegui, Pedro, Olsson, M., Padman, Laurence
• Format: Still Image
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2012
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/93199

Elosegui, Pedro . et. al.-- AGU Fall Meeting 3–7 December 2012, San Francisco, California Project “Arctic Ocean sea ice and ocean circulation using satellite methods”ù (SATICE), is the first high-rate, high-precision, continuous GPS positioning experiment on sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The SATICE systems collect continuous, dual-frequency carrier-phase GPS data while drifting on sea ice. Additional geophysical measurements also collected include ocean water pressure, ocean surface salinity, atmospheric pressure, snow-depth, air-ice-ocean temperature profiles, photographic imagery, and others, enabling sea ice drift, freeboard, weather, ice mass balance, and sea-level height determination. Relatively large volumes of data from each buoy are streamed over a satellite link to a central computer on the Internet in near real time, where they are processed to estimate the time-varying buoy positions. SATICE system obtains continuous GPS data at sub-minute intervals with a positioning precision of a few centimetres in all three dimensions. Although monitoring of sea ice motions goes back to the early days of satellite observations, these autonomous platforms bring out a level of spatio-temporal detail that has never been seen before, especially in the vertical axis. These high-resolution data allows us to address new polar science questions and challenge our present understanding of both sea ice dynamics and Arctic oceanography. We will describe the technology behind this new autonomous platform, which could also be adapted to other applications that require high resolution positioning information with sustained operations and observations in the polar marine environment, and present results pertaining to sea ice dynamics and physical oceanography Peer Reviewed