Abstract
There is a growing need for operational oceanographic predictions in both the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions. In the former, this is driven by a declining ice cover accompanied by an increase in maritime traffic and exploitation of marine resources. Oceanographic predictions in the Antarctic are also important, both to support Antarctic operations and also to help elucidate processes governing sea ice and ice shelf stability. However, a significant gap exists in the ocean observing system in polar regions, compared to most areas of the global ocean, hindering the reliability of ocean and sea ice forecasts. This gap can also be seen from the spread in ocean and sea ice reanalyses for polar regions which provide an estimate of their uncertainty. The reduced reliability of polar predictions may affect the quality of various applications including search and rescue, coupling with numerical weather and seasonal predictions, historical reconstructions (reanalysis), aquaculture and environmental management including environmental emergency response. Here, we outline the status of existing near-real time ocean observational efforts in polar regions, discuss gaps, and explore perspectives for the future. Specific recommendations include a renewed call for open access to data, especially real-time data, as a critical capability for improved sea ice and weather forecasting and other environmental prediction needs. Dedicated efforts are also needed to make use of additional observations made as part of the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP; 2017–2019) to inform optimal observing system design. To provide a polar extension to the Argo network, it is recommended that a network of ice-borne sea ice and upper-ocean observing buoys be deployed and supported operationally in ice-covered areas together with autonomous profiling floats and gliders (potentially with ice detection capability) in seasonally ice covered seas. Finally, additional efforts to better measure and parameterize surface exchanges in polar regions are much needed to improve coupled environmental prediction.
Highlights
Over the last 10 years, there has been a significant maturing of ocean prediction systems, led by efforts such as GODAE OceanView (GOV; Bell et al, 2015; Davidson et al, 2019) and the European Union Copernicus Marine Environmental Monitoring Service (CMEMS; Le Traon et al, 2017)
There is a significant spread in sea ice concentration products obtained through different retrieval algorithms (Ivanova et al, 2014), which affects the consistency of ocean-sea ice analyses that assimilate those products (Chevallier et al, 2016; Uotila et al, 2018), and the skill of seasonal predictions initialized from those reanalyses (e.g., Bunzel et al, 2016)
Studies based on AltiKa (Ka-band about 35.7 GHz) and CryoSat-2 (Ku-band about 13.5 GHz) satellite data have shown that differences in penetration of Ka- and Ku-band are correlated with snow loading on sea ice (Armitage and Ridout, 2015; Guerreiro et al, 2016)
Summary
Over the last 10 years, there has been a significant maturing of ocean prediction systems, led by efforts such as GODAE OceanView (GOV; Bell et al, 2015; Davidson et al, 2019) and the European Union Copernicus Marine Environmental Monitoring Service (CMEMS; Le Traon et al, 2017). The importance of polar sea ice initial conditions in affecting skill of monthly-to-seasonal predictions at lower latitudes in the atmosphere has been discussed (e.g., Guémas et al, 2016b) These advances are fostering a coupled modeling approach in the context of Earth system reanalyses for climate monitoring (e.g., Buizza et al, 2018). The increasing use of coupled models noted above requires collocated observations of the atmosphere, ice and ocean, including flux estimates (Bourassa et al, 2013) This is all the more important because of the role of the Arctic region in particular in shaping the heat and freshwater transports at global scales, having a crucial remote impact on the midand low- latitude climate as well (Serreze and Barry, 2011; Jung et al, 2015). Recommendations and an outlook for the future are presented in Sections “Recommendations” and “Outlook.”
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