Year
2019–2022
Operation Area
Chukchi Sea
Purpose
NASA’s Multi-Sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature project (MISST) is an international and inter-agency collaboration to improve weather and climate research and prediction by providing better-quality ocean temperature measurements from satellites. Over a period of five years (skipping 2020), Saildrone will send a group of vehicles to the Chukchi Sea to collect surface and subsurface data including but not limited to air temperature, sea surface skin and bulk temperatures, salinity, oxygen and chlorophyll-a concentrations, barometric pressure, and wind speed and direction.
The data from these cruises is expected to provide some of the first Arctic upper ocean temperature profiles collected with a full suite of surface measurements, leading to significant improvements in modeling diurnal warming. This new data will also substantially benefit the project by providing additional Arctic sea surface temperature observations for algorithm development and validation, and provide additional data for studies of air-sea-ice interactions.
The 2019 mission part of a was a joint effort between NOAA and the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) Arctic MISST study. Four of six vehicles deployed sailed into the Chukchi Sea to run transects approaching the southern sea ice edge.
Results
Real-time comparisons of the 2019 Saildrone data with numerical models revealed that surface net heat fluxes in the Arctic vary substantially, short-range numerical predictions can be very good for certain variables but not for others, and they deviate quickly from saildrone in situ observations as the prediction range increases.
