HR: 13:55h
AN: OS33C-02 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: The North Pole Mooring: A Window on the Arctic Ocean
AU: * Aagaard, K
EM: aagaard@apl.washington.edu
AF: Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington, 1013 N.E. 40th Street, Seattle, WA 98105-6698 United States
AU: Andersen, R
EM: roger@apl.washington.edu
AF: Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington, 1013 N.E. 40th Street, Seattle, WA 98105-6698 United States
AU: Johnson, J
EM: jimj@apl.washington.edu
AF: Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington, 1013 N.E. 40th Street, Seattle, WA 98105-6698 United States
AB: We have maintained an instrumented mooring over the abyssal floor of the Arctic Ocean, about 30 n. mi. from the Pole, since April 2001. The mooring is re-deployed annually and extends to within 50 m of the surface, its instruments measuring temperature and salinity, water and ice velocity, and ice thickness. We find multi-year cooling and freshening trends both in the Atlantic layer and in the deep water. The observed Atlantic layer cooling represents a reversal of the dramatic and widely cited mid-depth warming that began about 15 years ago. The velocity records show numerous eddies in the upper ocean, generally anticyclonic, but there are also eddies that reach much deeper, including a strong five-month event the second year, during which the mooring was drawn down over 60 m. That eddy, which was anomalously warm, saline, and dense in the upper ocean, but warm, fresh, and of relatively low density in the deep water, may have extended to the ocean floor at 4300 m. Overall, the moored record suggests considerable variability in the interior ocean, away from the boundaries along which changes have been presumed to propagate. This variability extends downward at least into the upper deep waters.
DE: 4207 Arctic and Antarctic oceanography
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting