Alice and I are off to the Beaufort Sea again. We leave Fairbanks tonight, and should be on the Louis S. St. Laurent by Thursday. 2 days of travel just to meet the boat. I am looking forward to the cruise. It is a month later than previous years, so we will be in the Beaufort at the time when the minimum ice extent is reached and the ocean starts to freeze up again. As you can see from the planned cruise track, we are hoping to get quite far north. I wonder how our progress with be.
The Cryosphere Today website (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/) gives some insight into what the current ice conditions are like. Looking at the satellite passive microwave map of ice concentration from yesterday, we see the ice extent in the Beaufort right now is similar to the record lows of the previous two years. One difference from these last two years is that the edge is quite diffuse, due to wind forced divergence of the ice pack during August. So we expect to see more areas with unconsolidated ice this year compared to previous years.
This should be a packed cruise. We only have 4 weeks, of which about 2 will probably be in the ice pack. We will be collecting visual and in-situ measurements at ice stations to validate passive microwave ice concentration products. I will try to keep you posted on what the ice conditions are like during the cruise. I am also interested in how the distribution of ice types has changed in the Beaufort Sea since the 1990s. We have found that ice moves into the Northern Beaufort from the Chukchi Sea during most winters. Since the turn of the centary the Chukchi Sea has become a seasonal ice zone, so this ice entering the Beaufort is first year ice. This has dramatic impacts on the ice recirculation in the Beaufort Gyre. Essentially this ice is becoming younger. Our observations will be compared against buoy drift models of ice age
~Jenny Hutchings
