The Ice-Tethered Profiler : Argo of the Arctic

Abstract

Author Posting. © Oceanography Society, 2011. This article is posted here by permission of Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 24 no. 3 (2011): 126–135, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2011.64.Ice-Tethered Profilers (ITPs), first deployed in fall 2004, have significantly increased the number of high-quality upper-ocean water-property observations available from the central Arctic. This article reviews the instrument technology and provides a status report on performance, along with several examples of the science that ITPs and companion instrumentation support.Initial development of the ITP concept was supported by the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Technology Innovation Program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Funding for construction and deployment of the prototype ITPs was provided by the National Science Foundation Oceanographic Technology and Interdisciplinary Coordination (OTIC) Program and Office of Polar Programs (OPP) under Grant OCE-0324233. Continued support has been provided by the OPP Arctic Sciences Section under Awards ARC-0519899, ARC-0631951, ARC-0856479, and internal WHOI funding, including the James M. and Ruth P. Clark Initiative for Arctic Research