Remote sensing for understanding air-ice-sea gas exchange over landfast sea ice during spring melt season in the Canadian Archipelago

Our ability to model the air-sea exchange of CO2 with confidence in the Polar Oceans, a key component of global climate systems, is currently limited due to critical gaps in our understanding of the relationship and interactions between the air, sea, atmosphere and ice. This includes ice-driven CO2 fluxes during Spring melt season. Eddy covariance techniques provide the best available method to measure direct air-ice-sea fluxes of CO2. Qikirtaarjuk Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago hosts the only permanent eddy covariance system in the world; the site continuously measures fluxes over landfast sea ice. During the placement drones and fixed point cameras will be used to collect fine-scale in-situ observations of sea ice and melt ponds in the footprint of the EC equipment over the Spring melt season. Combining these with direct CO2 flux measurements made by the tower will provide a dataset from which new understanding of the relationship between Arctic oceanic CO2 uptake, sea ice and melt pond dynamics can be obtained.

Faculty Supervisor:

Brent Else

Student:

Partner:

University of Exeter

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Calgary

Program: