IARC Research Group Receives DEPSCoR Award

May 5, 2006

The International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is pleased to announce that the Ice Covered Ocean Response To Atmospheric Systems (ICORTAS) study will receive over a million dollars from the Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR). DESPCoR is a competitive award given in states that have not traditionally been recipients of a large amount of Federal research grants. It is designed to improve the capabilities of U.S. institutions of higher education in eligible states to conduct research and to educate scientists and engineers in areas important to national defense or the Office of Naval Research.

The ICORTAS principal investigator is Harper Simmons, with co-investigators: William Hibler, Vladimir Ivanov, Jennifer Hutchings, Andrew Roberts, Igor Polyakov, David Atkinson, and Igor Dmitrenko. ICORTAS is designed to quantify the energetic response of the upper ocean to atmospheric weather systems by integrating observations and modeling analyses of ocean properties and processes with storm analysis and sea-ice dynamics.

For the observational component, ICORTAS will operate in cooperation with the IARC Nansen and Amundsen Basins Observational System (NABOS) on the 2006 and 2007 cruises aboard the Russian Icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn.  The ICORTAS observational system will be built from an array of moorings that will be deployed in the remote Laptev Sea and will measure currents, sea-ice drift, temperature, and salinity.

The modeling component of the study is designed to inform field operations and to make direct use of the observed sea-ice-deformation to verify and calibrate sea-ice/ocean models. This combination of field and numerical investigations provides an unprecedented opportunity to relate ice characteristics at motion to underlying ocean energy levels.

ICORTAS hopes to improve simulations of the upper ocean with benefits for real-time prediction systems for ship navigation and submarine surfacing in seasonally ice-covered regions such as the Arctic Ocean, the Sea of Okhotsk in the Western Pacific Ocean, and the Labrador Sea/Gulf of St. Lawrence in the Northwestern Atlantic Ocean.

Ice Covered Ocean Response To Atmospheric Storms (ICORTAS) Study Components

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