Heat flux through the Barrow Canyon

This project is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up.

The Pasific Summer Water (PSW) flows into the western Arctic Ocean through Barrow Canyon, and reaches at Northwind Ridge Area (Fig. 1). The PSW is the main source of oceanic heat delivered into the upper layer of the western Arctic Ocean, and its heat content is one of the key parameters to understand recent drastic sea-ice reduction. Hence, volume transport and heat flux through Barrow Canyon is needed to be elucidated for forecasting the Arctic sea-ice variability. It is hard to monitor oceanic state from Barrow Canyon to NorthWind Ridge during winter, unless the mooring system is deployed.

In this study, we attempt to estimate and evaluate volume transport and heat flux through Barrow Canyon, following Mizobata et al. (2010).

At the Barrow Canyon, three Mooring system had been deployed (2002-2007, Fig . 2). we are using measurements of those three mooring system (velocity, conductivity and temperature) and satellite-derived wind/SST to accomplish our goal.

Figure 1: Schematics of oceanic current in the upperlayer of western Arctic Ocean (sorry in Japanese!).	Figure 2: Barrow Canyon and locations of the three mooring system, which had been deployed by the JWACS project.