Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project | Overview

The Beaufort Gyre has been characterized in the past as the region of "relative inaccessibility" because of the difficulty of accessing the area by icebreaker due to heavy ice conditions and by airplane due to its remoteness from the mainland. As a result, the area is one of the most poorly sampled regions in the Arctic Ocean. In 2002, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs recognized the great importance of the Beaufort Gyre in the fresh water balance of the Arctic Ocean and funded the "Beaufort Gyre Freshwater Experiment [BGFE]: Study of fresh water accumulation and release mechanism and a role of fresh water in Arctic climate variability" (Principal Investigator, Andrey Proshutinsky). The major goal of this project is to investigate basin-scale mechanisms regulating freshwater content in the Arctic Ocean and particularly in the Beaufort Gyre throughout a complete annual cycle (see Background). As part of the field experiment for this project, three bottom-tethered moorings were deployed with CTD and velocity profilers, upward looking sonars for ice draft measurements, and bottom pressure recorders, and four expendable surface buoys with CTDs (see Instruments for details) during a Joint Western Arctic Climate Study (JWACS) cruise on the Canadian Coast Guard Icebreaker Louis S. St. Laurent (LSL) in August 2003 (see 2003 Cruise).

However, given the importance of this region for Arctic climate studies, it was desired to investigate interannual and longer variability, so that it was necessary to continue acquiring the same data for several years, although the observational program supported by NSF would end with recovery of the moorings in 2004. In 2004, WHOI's Ocean and Climate Change Institute provided the support to redeploy the three moorings in order to continue monitoring freshwater and heat content in this climatically sensitive region of the Arctic Ocean, thus establishing the Beaufort Gyre Observing System (BGOS).

In August 2004, the sites were revisited, the moorings were recovered, data was retrieved from the instruments, the hardware and sensors were refurbished, and the systems were redeployed at the same locations again from the LSL during a JWACS cruise (see 2004 Cruise). In addition, a prototype Ice-Tethered Profiler (ITP) buoy was deployed in combination with an Ice Mass Balance (IMB) buoy.

In 2004, NSF granted a 5-year proposal "The Beaufort Gyre System: Flywheel of the Arctic Climate?" so that all the moorings that are recovered in 2005 with support of the WHOI Ocean and Climate Change Institute, will be maintained until 2008 with NSF support and investigation of the Beaufort Gyre system will continue.