HR: 08:30h
AN: C11C-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Satellite/Submarine Arctic Sea Ice Remote Sensing in 2004 and 2007
AU: * Hughes, N E
EM: nick.hughes@sams.ac.uk
AF: Scottish Association for Marine Science, Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory, Oban, PA37 1QA, United Kingdom
AU: Wadhams, P
EM: p.wadhams@damtp.cam.ac.uk
AF: University of Cambridge, DAMTP - CMS Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, United Kingdom
AU: Rodrigues, J
EM: jmr64@hermes.cam.ac.uk
AF: University of Cambridge, DAMTP - CMS Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, United Kingdom
AB: After an interlude of 8 years the U.K. Royal Navy returned to the Arctic Ocean with an under-ice mission by the submarine shape HMS Tireless in April 2004. A full environmental monitoring programme in which U.K. civilian scientists were allowed to participate was integrated into the mission. This was subsequently followed by a second expedition, in March 2007, which allowed further measurements to be acquired. These have so far been the only opportunities for civilian scientists to utilise navy submarines in the Arctic since the demise of the U.S. SCICEX programme in 2000. This paper presents some of the data collected on these new missions and uses it for validation of sea ice information derived from coincident acquisitions by modern satellite sensors such as the ESA Envisat ASAR and NASA MODIS. In both the 2004 and 2007 expeditions shape Tireless took a track north of Greenland along the latitude 85° N. This was similar to the route used for an earlier submarine-aircraft combined survey in April 1987 with which our results shall be compared. In all three missions the submarine was equipped with a standard upward-looking echosounder and sidescan for ice observations and a full range of satellite-borne, or airborne in the case of the earlier mission, microwave and optical sensors were available for validation. In this study we concentrate on the submarine track north of Greenland from the Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ) in Fram Strait through to the Lincoln Sea around 65° W. This transect encompasses a wide range of differing sea ice conditions, from the highly mobile mixture of first year and multi year ice being transported on the trans-polar drift through to the highly deformed ice north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The combination of submarine measurements of ice thickness and satellite/aircraft top-side measurements gives an accurate indication of how changes in the ice regime are taking place and allows the potential development of multi-sensor data fusion algorithms for improved sea ice classification and estimation of thickness.
DE: 0750 Sea ice (4540)
DE: 0758 Remote sensing
DE: 1621 Cryospheric change (0776)
DE: 9310 Antarctica (4207)
SC: Cryosphere [C]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting