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Lagrangian observations of Antarctic sea ice: the International Programme for Antarctic Buoys
Enrico Zambianchi
WCRP/SCAR - IPAB Chairman
enrico.zambianchi@uniparthenope.it(Abstract received 04/30/2005 for session C)
ABSTRACT
We take the opportunity to acquaint the LAPCOD community with the Lagrangian description of a (relatively) unusual fluid environment: the ice-covered sea, and in particular the Antarctic sea-ice zone (ASIZ), which we define as the region of the Southern Ocean and Antarctic marginal seas south of 55 S or within the maximum seasonal sea ice extent. The International Programme for Antarctic Buoys (IPAB), a programme of the World Climate Research Project (WCRP) co-sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) has been active for over 10 years, with the objective of establishing and maintaining a network of drifting buoys in the ASIZ. We review how IPAB platforms have contributed in the past to shed light on many aspects of the dynamics and thermodynamics of the ASIZ: tagging and revisiting ice formation sites; studying the large scale ice drift mechanisms and climatology; providing estimates of annual sea ice transport from and of freshwater balance in marginal basins; assessing the thermodynamic importance of open water regions, and in particular the role of leads in energy balance and ice formation. We also review the application of buoy data in the validation of models and of satellite product. We finally outline an initiative to implement and coordinate the collaborative deployment of a dense network of instrumented drifting buoys, put forward by IPAB for the International Polar Year (2007-2008) on the basis of the past experience, which shows that the role of autonomous platforms may not be easily substituted -- but rather very efficiently complemented -- by in situ measurement campaigns, necessarily limited in time, or by remotely sensed data, characterized by coarser temporal resolution.
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2005 LAPCOD Meeting, Lerici, Italy, June 13-17, 2005