Description: The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Rabe, B., Heuze, C., Regnery, J., Aksenov, Y., Allerholt, J., Athanase, M., Bai, Y., Basque, C., Bauch, D., Baumann, T. M., Chen, D., Cole, S. T., Craw, L., Davies, A., Damm, E., Dethloff, K., Divine, D., Doglioni, F., Ebert, F., Fang, Y-C., Fer, I., Fong, A. A., Gradinger, R., Granskog, M. A., Graupner, R., Haas, C., He, H., He, Y., Hoppmann, M., Janout, M., Kadko, D., Kanzow, T., Karam, S., Kawaguchi, Y., Koenig, Z., Kong, B., Krishfield, R. A., Krumpen, T., Kuhlmey, D., Kuznetsov, I., Lan, M., Laukert, G., Lei, R., Li, T., Torres-Valdés, S., Lin, L,. Lin, L., Liu, H., Liu, N., Loose, B., Ma, X., MacKay, R., Mallet, M., Mallett, R. D. C., Maslowski, W., Mertens, C., Mohrholz, V., Muilwijk, M., Nicolaus, M., O’Brien, J. K., Perovich, D., Ren, J., Rex, M., Ribeiro, N., Rinke, A., Schaffer, J., Schuffenhauer, I., Schulz, K., Shupe, M. D., Shaw, W., Sokolov, V., Sommerfeld, A., Spreen, G., Stanton, T., Stephens, M., Su, J., Sukhikh, N., Sundfjord, A., Thomisch, K., Tippenhauer, S., Toole, J. M., Vredenborg, M., Walter, M., Wang, H., Wang, L., Wang, Y., Wendisch, M., Zhao, J., Zhou, M., & Zhu, J. Overview of the MOSAiC expedition: physical oceanography. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 10(1), (2022): 1, https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2021.00062.

Description: Arctic Ocean properties and processes are highly relevant to the regional and global coupled climate system, yet still scarcely observed, especially in winter. Team OCEAN conducted a full year of physical oceanography observations as part of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), a drift with the Arctic sea ice from October 2019 to September 2020. An international team designed and implemented the program to characterize the Arctic Ocean system in unprecedented detail, from the seafloor to the air-sea ice-ocean interface, from sub-mesoscales to pan-Arctic. The oceanographic measurements were coordinated with the other teams to explore the ocean physics and linkages to the climate and ecosystem. This paper introduces the major components of the physical oceanography program and complements the other team overviews of the MOSAiC observational program. Team OCEAN’s sampling strategy was designed around hydrographic ship-, ice- and autonomous platform-based measurements to improve the understanding of regional circulation and mixing processes. Measurements were carried out both routinely, with a regular schedule, and in response to storms or opening leads. Here we present along-drift time series of hydrographic properties, allowing insights into the seasonal and regional evolution of the water column from winter in the Laptev Sea to early summer in Fram Strait: freshening of the surface, deepening of the mixed layer, increase in temperature and salinity of the Atlantic Water. We also highlight the presence of Canada Basin deep water intrusions and a surface meltwater layer in leads. MOSAiC most likely was the most comprehensive program ever conducted over the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. While data analysis and interpretation are ongoing, the acquired datasets will support a wide range of physical oceanography and multi-disciplinary research. They will provide a significant foundation for assessing and advancing modeling capabilities in the Arctic Ocean.

Description: The following projects and funding agencies contributed to this work: Why is the deep Arctic Ocean Warming is funded by the Swedish Research Council, project number 2018-03859, and berth fees for this project were covered by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat; The Changing Arctic Ocean (CAO) program, jointly funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), in particular, the CAO projects Advective Pathways of nutrients and key Ecological substances in the ARctic (APEAR) grants NE/R012865/1, NE/R012865/2, and #03V01461, and the project Primary productivity driven by Escalating Arctic NUTrient fluxeS grant #03F0804A; The Research Council of Norway (AROMA, grant no 294396; HAVOC, grant no 280292; and CAATEX, grant no 280531); Collaborative Research: Thermodynamics and Dynamic Drivers of the Arctic Sea Ice Mass Budget at Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate; National Science Foundation (NSF) projects 1723400, Stanton; OPP-1724551, Shupe; The Helmholtz society strategic investment Frontiers in Arctic Marine monitoring (FRAM); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) through the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre TRR 172 “ArctiC Amplification: Climate Relevant Atmospheric and SurfaCe Processes, and Feedback Mechanisms (AC)3” (grant 268020496); The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant numbers JP18H03745, JP18KK0292, and JP17KK0083) and the COLE grant of U. Tokyo; National Key Research and Development Plan Sub-Project of Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2016YFA0601804), “Simulation, Prediction and Regional Climate Response of Global Warming Hiatus”, 2016/07-2021/06; National Science Foundation grant number OPP-1756100 which funded two of the Ice-Tethered Profilers and all the Ice-Tethered Profiler deployments; Chinese Polar Environmental Comprehensive Investigation and Assessment Programs, funded by the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration; Marine Science and Technology Fund of Shandong Province for Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Grant: 2018SDKJ0104-1) and Chinese Natural Science Foundation (Grant: 41941012); UK NERC Long-term Science Multiple Centre National Capability Programme “North Atlantic Climate System Integrated Study (ACSIS)”, grant NE/N018044/1; The London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership grant (NE/L002485/1) which funded RDCM; NSF grant number OPP-1753423, which funded the 7Be tracer –measurements; and The Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung (AWI) through its projects: AWI_OCEAN, AWI_ROV, AWI_ICE, AWI_SNOW, AWI_ECO, AWI_ATMO, and AWI_BGC.

Description: In 1997, a unique hydrographic and chlorofluorocarbon (CFC: component CFC-11) dataset was obtained in the subpolar North Atlantic. To estimate the synopticity of the 1997 data, the recent temporal evolution of the CFC and Labrador Sea Water (LSW) thickness fields are examined. In the western Atlantic north of 50°N, the LSW thickness decreased considerably from 1994–97, while the mean CFC concentrations did not change much. South of 50°N and in the eastern Atlantic, the CFC concentration increased with little or no change in the LSW thickness. On shorter timescales, local anomalies due to the presence of eddies are observed, but for space scales larger than the eddies the dataset can be treated as being synoptic over the 1997 observation period. The spreading of LSW in the subpolar North Atlantic is described in detail using gridded CFC and LSW thickness fields combined with Profiling Autonomous Lagrangian Circulation Explorer (PALACE) float trajectories. The gridded fields are also used to calculate the CFC-11 inventory in the LSW from 40° to 65°N, and from 10° to 60°W. In total, 2300 ± 250 tons of CFC-11 (equivalent to 16.6 million moles) were brought into the LSW by deep convection. In 1997, 28% of the inventory was still found in the Labrador Sea west of 45°W and 31% of the inventory was located in the eastern Atlantic. The CFC inventory in the LSW was used to estimate the lower limits of LSW formation rates. At a constant formation rate, a value of 4.4–5.6 Sv (Sv ≡ 106 m3 s−1) is obtained. If the denser modes of LSW are ventilated only in periods with intense convection, the minimum formation rate of LSW in 1988–94 is 8.1–10.8 Sv, and 1.8–2.4 Sv in 1995–97

Description: In the Gulf of Lions, observations of deep convection have been sporadically carried out over the past three decades, showing significant interannual variability of convection activity. As long time series of meteorological observations of the region are available from coastal stations, heat flux time series for the Gulf of Lions for the individual winters from 1969 to 1994 are derived by calibrating these observations against direct measurements obtained over the convection site. These heat fluxes are also compared against heat fluxes obtained by the French PERIDOT weather model for the winter of 1991/92. A Kraus–Turner one-dimensional mixed layer model is initialized by climatological mean temperature and salinity profiles and then driven by the heat flux time series of the individual years. Resulting convection depths are in satisfactory agreement with existing observational evidence, showing the dominance of interannual variability of local forcing on convection variability. The interannual variability of convection depth causes interannual variations in deep-water properties, and these are also compared with the hydrographic database.