Fram Strait

Tomorrow I leave Norway, sort of, and not for home but for Svalbard.

I am flying to Longyearbyen, Svalbard before heading out on the research vessel (R/V) Lance. I will be joining the Norwegian Polar Institute Fram Strait Cruise. The cruise heads across Fram Strait to the east coast of Greenland.

Arctic MOSIAC from NASA MODIS sensor on Terra Satellite. We will be going between Greenland and Svalbard (which is mostly hidden by clouds in this picture). Click the caption to be taken to the full size image. I acknowledge the use of Rapid Response imagery from the Land Atmosphere Near-real time Capability for EOS (LANCE) system operated by the NASA/GSFC/Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) with funding provided by NASA/HQ.

I will spend a couple days in Longyearbyen beforehand to prepare equipment, help with packing/sorting, getting assigned my polar gear and some shooting training and a few other tasks.

The main objective of the cruise is the retrieval of oceanographic instrument packages called moorings (because they are anchored to the sea floor). The moorings will be serviced and redeployed to collect another year of data.  But while this happens there will be sea ice stations and airborne EM ice thickness surveys. I hope we will manage an EM flight along a CryoSat-2 track, would be of very high interest for me. The oceanographers will also perform CTD and tracer measurements.

CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth/pressure) is a standard suite of measurements that can give you a lot of information on the structure of the ocean and where parts of the water originate.  Different regions form waters with different characteristics that show up as characteristic layers in the ocean.  Conductivity is just a measure of how well the water conducts electricity and then gives you an idea of how salty the water is. I think you all know what temperature and pressure are.

The cruise is going much closer to the coast of Greenland than when I joined in 2010, so I am looking forward to that. It will be nice to get on the ice again.  I always like seeing the ice in summer/freeze up, it looks completely different than in spring. Fram Strait is also a different region and has a different ice regime.  In the Lincoln Sea, the ice often moves against the coast and you have very thick ice.  In Fram Strait, ice is drifting out of the Arctic Ocean and move south.

Here is an ice chart produced by the Norwegian Meteorological Service. The different colors show the different ice concentrations.

Sea Ice Concentration for today, August 7, 2013. Courtesy of Met.NO at http://wms.met.no/icechart/

I will try to blog, at least with text and hopefully an odd picture or two (though they will have to be very small and very low resolution).