We have established an environmental monitoring program near Barrow on the North Coast of Alaska, focused towards understanding the apportioning of solar radiation over marine and terrestrial Arctic surfaces, measuring of a comprehensive suite of sea ice properties, and deriving of heat and mass fluxes at the lower and upper ice surfaces. Such information is critical to understanding the role of the ice cover in the climate system and its importance as indicator and modulator of climate variability and change. This effort would result in a baseline data set of value as: (1) a record of the impact of Arctic climate variability and change on thermodynamic growth and ablation of lake and sea ice covers, (2) a benchmark for validation and improvement of Arctic climate model hierarchies, (3) a testbed for more sophisticated process models of radiative transfer and summer melt in the atmosphere-ice ocean-system, (4) a complement to studies of the ecology and geomorphology of the Arctic coastal system, and (5) an important ancillary to ongoing and projected long-term observation programs such as ARM that are currently missing sea ice data sets.

The program comprises the deployment of automated monitoring stations on the ice during the fall and winter when conditions are relatively uniform, and a period of intensive field work each year during the critically important spring melt season when conditions are highly non-uniform and interactions between the ice, ocean and atmosphere are greatly accelerated. Among the measured and derived quantities are the dates defining establishment and decay of the ice cover as well as the seasonal evolution and variability of ice thickness, snow depth, ice conductive heat transfer, ice salinity and salt flux, surface albedo and ice transmissivity, pond areal coverage and depth. The program also determies areally averaged quantities (at the scale of single-column climate models) with the aid of an aerial survey. To ensure and foster the transfer of longer-term environmental data to the scientific community, the local indigenous population and the wider public, this web site provides access to data sets and places the measurements in a wider context. The project also encompasses an educational component aimed at increasing awareness and scientific literacy in the context of Arctic regions and climate variability and change. There is a K-12 educational outreach effort that is summarized at www.arcticice.org. Another outreach component is a webcam transmitting images looking out at the Chukchi Sea from NARL.