Although the polar oceans have been studied extensively during recent decades, year-round direct observations of sea ice, atmosphere and ocean are still relatively sparse. Hence, significant knowledge gaps exist in their complex interactions, and how they impact the evolution of the polar marine ecosystems. An important tool to fill these gaps has been developed and enhanced in recent years: autonomous, ice-based observation platforms. These buoys are capable of obtaining data on basin scales and year-round, including the largely undersampled winter periods. A key advantage over other observatory systems is that they send data in near-real time via satellite, contributing for example to numerical weather predictions through the Global Telecommunication Network (GTS).
Here we present a concept for the implementation of a long-term strategy to monitor essential physical and biogeochemical parameters in the central Arctic Ocean year round and synchronously. We propose a combination of several new and innovative types of ice-based buoys, such as weather stations, ice mass balance buoys, ice-tethered bio-optical buoys and upper ocean profilers, with a scientific payload optimized to enable interdisciplinary research. Over the next 4 years, including the observational periods of the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP, 2017-2019) and the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate (MOSAiC, 2020), a network of these platforms will be (re-)deployed in the central Arctic Ocean each year, benefitting from international logistical efforts. The ultimate aim is to achieve a quasi-synoptic, basin-wide coverage of key parameters, such as air temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed and –direction, ice and snow thickness, incoming, reflected and transmitted irradiance, seawater temperature and salinity, chl-a and CDOM fluorescence, turbidity, oxygen and nitrate. Initial results from similar deployments since 2015 suggest that this approach has great potential to advance our understanding of many physical and biogeochemical processes and interactions in the polar oceans
