Report on analysed data from IMBs:EU FP7 WP report

• Main Author: Hwang, Phil
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: European Commission 2014
• Subjects: Arctic; Chukchi Sea; East Siberian Sea; Chukchi; Korea Polar Research Institute; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://pure.uhi.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/report-on-analysed-data-from-imbs(78ea7036-64fc-4fa5-91de-2a8a42be67a2).html; http://www.access-eu.org/en/deliverables2/wp1.html

Sea Ice Mass Balance buoy (SIMBA) buoy is designed and manufactured in Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS). It consists of a GPS receiver, an Iridium receiver/transmitter, a series of individually addressable temperature sensors and heaters at 2 cm intervals along a 5-m chain (and 50 cm intervals along a 5-m chain within water column), and a battery power supply. The chains are deployed through 2-inch auger holes, extending completely through the ice and into the water column, with a segment suspended vertically above the air/snow interface. The temperature sensors are normally sampled four times a day, have a temperature resolution of 0.06°C, and were calibrated prior to deployment. Once the chain being deployed, each heater/sensor pair is used to detect the phase of the medium in which the sensor is sitting, through periodically heating and recording the relaxation of the temperature signal to the pre-heating value. For the detailed technical description please refer to Jackson et al (2013). In ACCESS project, through collaboration with Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI) and SATICE project, we deployed total of 14 SIMBAs during 2011 and 2012 summers in the Arctic. Primary objective of the SIMBA deployment is to study small-scale (within climate model grid size) thermodynamic and dynamic processes of sea ice and their interactions with the upper ocean properties. The 2011 deployment was made in the northern Chukchi Sea, while the 2012 deployment was made close to the East Siberian Sea. In this report we describe deployment and environmental conditions in Section 2. Detailed analysis of SIMBA data is presented in Section 3, in which we describe the results based on the deployment year. For 2011 SIMBA data our analysis highlights differential ice bottom melt rate observed from SIMBAs and the effects of solar radiative warming. As you see in this report the differential melt rate is closely related to heterogeneous distribution of solar heating (dominantly through the variation of sea ice concentrations) within a spatial scale of 90 km. For 2012 SIMBA data analysis we highlight the role of inertial ice motion in association with fluctuation of warm and cold water temperature in the upper-ocean mixed layer as well as detection of the interface between ice bottom and underlying water from SIMBAs. We also report small-scale floe deformation events that observed from 2012 SIMBA data.