The scientists who have participated in the MOSAIC international expedition have confirmed that the speed of Arctic surface air warming is more than twice that of the rest of the planet since the 1970s.
Hundreds of international researchers are analyzing Measurements made during the MOSAiC expedition (an acronym for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate), during which they recorded hundreds of environmental parameters with unprecedented precision and frequency over a full annual cycle in the central Arctic Ocean.
The researchers publish today in the journal Elementa some of the results of the expedition on the atmosphere, snow and sea ice, which also includes the first complete image of the global warming in that area.
According to the study, the extent of Arctic sea ice has nearly halved in summer since satellite records began in the 1980s.
During the expedition, the German icebreaker Polastern, with experts from twenty countries on board, spent an entire year, between 2019 and 2020, in the Arctic Ocean and drifted frozen in the ice.
The MOSAiC expedition has been coordinated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), with the collaboration of more than eighty scientific institutes from around the world and at a total cost of some 150 million euros (171.5 million dollars at current exchange rates), financed for the most part by the German Ministry of Education and Research.
“We found a more dynamic and faster drifting pack than expected. This not only challenged the teams on the ground in their daily work, but also resulted in changes in the properties of the sea ice and its thickness distribution”, explained Marcel Nicolaus, sea ice physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research.
On the Spanish side, the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) participated as a partner in the expedition, with funding from the State Research Agency.
Specifically, the work of Spanish scientists have consisted of placing a radiometer on the arctic surface, instrument similar to the one carried by the European Space Agency’s SMOS satellite, to measure the thickness of sea ice, with the aim of obtaining radiometry measurements in different conditions in order to better understand how the thickness of the snow affects the temperature and salinity of the ice to the emissivity of the ice and to be able to improve the measurements of ice thickness obtained by that satellite.
It is a fundamental variable to monitor the drastic changes that are taking place in the Arctic.
The radiometer -designed and developed in Spain and placed by the CSIC team in the Arctic, one of the most difficult to access areas on the planet- will make it possible to obtain more reliable estimates of the thickness of the ice from satellites.
Spanish scientists have also been responsible for an experiment installed on the ice floe to study the interaction between sea ice and navigation signals transmitted from satellites, such as GPS.
In this experiment, financed by the European Space Agency, the equipment was designed to be able to operate in the extreme conditions of the Arctic, autonomously and almost continuously.
Their preliminary results suggest, according to the experts, that this measurement technique using navigation signals could be applied from low-cost satellites to monitor the poles continuously. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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