Drift trajectories of the main sites of the Distributed Network and the Central Observatories of MOSAiC 2019/2020
Marcel Nicolaus, Kathrin Riemann‐Campe, Bliss Angela, Hutchings Jennnifer K., Granskog Mats A., Christian Haas, Mario Hoppmann, Torsten Kanzow, Krishfield Richard, Ruibo Lei, Markus Rex, Tao Li, Benjamin Rabe
Abstract
During the “Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC)” in 2019/2020 a Distributed Network (DN) of autonomous stations (buoys) was installed on the sea ice and drifted across the Arctic Ocean. The DN consisted of a hierarchy of sites, called medium (M) and large (L) sites. The 3 L sites (L1 to L3) were the most complex sites in terms of instrumentation. They consisted of ocean profilers, atmospheric stations and sea ice observations. The 9 M sites (M1 to M8 and LM) consisted of sea ice and snow mass balance measurements. Additional autonomous instruments were operated in the Central Observatory (CO), which consisted of the research ice breaker Polarstern and the adjacent ice camp. Over the course of the MOSAiC expedition, 3 different COs were established because of re-locations of Polarstern. Here we define one position of each main site as a reference position over time. The report describes the data sources of each site and their processing to retrieve the 16 final drift trajectories.