Breakout Summary Report

ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting

19 - 23 March 2018

Session Title: MOSAiC Science and Implementation
Session Date: 19 March 2018
Session Time: 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Number of Attendees: 50
Summary Authors: Matthew Shupe

Breakout Description

This session will focus on the future Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) campaign and DOE's role in it. There will be a general introduction and status overview of the broader MOSAiC campaign. Thereafter will be targeted presentations focused on specific aspects of MOSAiC, potentially including implementation considerations, the approach to aerosol
measurements, radar strategies, activities on the ice, coordination with other funded science activities, potential scientific analyses, model studies, and more. These presentations will be followed by discussion on key issues of coordination and science.

Main Discussion

The MOSAiC session started with a collection of presentations providing a background on the overall project, a couple of additional observing activities by coordinated scientists (enhanced aerosol observations and surface flux observations), and a couple of perspectives on related modeling activities that will use the MOSAiC observations as a foundation. These provided the background for extensive questions and discussion about specific details of the project. Much of the discussion is summarized under the specific headings below.

A few key points include:
1) ARM’s LASSO modeling activity is currently having discussions about its future expansion to other locations. One presenter suggested that the future focus of LASSO could move to the Arctic and this might include MOSAiC and/or the NSA sites. Discussion on this topic was encouraged during the LASSO breakout session on Thursday morning.

2) There was specific interest in the MOSAiC data policy since it is a large international campaign. Shupe indicated that there is a developmental data policy that will be pushed towards a final policy in the coming year. Generally, the US contributions to MOSAiC, largely from DOE and NSF, are required to follow a very open data policy that enables broad use of the data. Shupe’s objective is to promote this general approach for the whole of MOSAiC. There has been some push back on this, as many institutions/nations do not have the same level of openness in their data policies; nonetheless, it is looking favorable that a relatively open data policy will be adopted to help get open access to all MOSAiC data. Also, there is a MOSAiC endorsement process whereby interested/funded investigators can become members of the MOSAiC consortium and gain earlier access to data.

3) It was acknowledged that MOSAiC will include a great deal of measurements and that over the full year there will be many different events that are relevant to different sub-groups of people. A good example is the occurrence of leads in the sea ice that would modify the heat fluxes to the atmosphere. To enable broader use of MOSAiC data, it would be impactful to develop a “guidebook” of the MOSAiC year that is a high-level summary to support more targeted research activities.

4) There was a specific question about participation of individual investigators in MOSAiC by being ARM guest instruments (i.e., instrument operation would be supported by ARM operators and would not require the individual investigators to be on site). In principle this is possible, via the ARM IOP proposal process. Sally McFarlane indicated that while this may be possible, guest instrument participation would be very limited.

Issues

1) As part of an ongoing discussion, it was acknowledged that we need to develop an approach to monitoring pollution aerosols for sampling during MOSAiC. The Polarstern icebreaker will have engines on and will be producing local pollution; thus, depending on the wind direction and speed, there could be implications for aerosol measurements being made on the bow of the ship. There are two parts of this issue: A) identifying when pollution is occurring so that it can be filtered out of data analysis; B) potential adverse impacts of pollution on instrumentation. The former is not much of an issue and just requires working with various indicators of pollution. The latter is more concerning and will need to be addressed to minimize the impact on instrument maintenance. This aspect will be taken up further by representatives from the AMF2 and AOS.

2) It was also identified that we have a challenge in operating the scanning radar aboard the ship. This will require offline discussions with the radar team and a site visit to the Polarstern ship, which will occur in June 2018.

3) Site communications was identified as a key issue to consider and to better understand. Current capabilities for the Polarstern when operating in the central Arctic are quite limited, such that most data will not be sent back to the mainland in real time. It is likely that only limited email and some small quicklook imagery can be sent. This will be a significant challenge for the instrument mentors and site operators. It was mentioned that Iridium NEXT should be available at the time, which might offer the possibility for vastly enhanced communications.

Needs

Some portion of the discussion focused on the specific needs that the modeling community has for MOSAiC data. The specific products that were mentioned include: Surface fluxes over multiple surface conditions, the thermal conductivity of the sea ice, the emissivity of the surface, routine thermodynamic profiling, and forcing for models. To the last point, it was acknowledged that forcing for LES-type models will be a huge challenge in that we will not have, for example, radiosoundings over a spatial domain on a regular basis. There will be some limited surface measurements over a spatial domain. However, at limited times there will be aircraft flying in the region that will include dropsondes; these can provide a useful constraint on the large-scale flow to force LES-type simulations.

Future Plans

There are many future plans associated with MOSAiC. The first step is a MOSAiC-wide science implementation workshop in Germany in May-June followed in June by a visit to the Polarstern icebreaker to assess many installation issues.

Action Items

In discussions of links with the modeling community, and specifically the DOE modeling community, it was acknowledged that the MOSAiC team should connect with Phil Rasch and the DOE High-Latitude (HiLAT) modeling project. Shupe will reach out to Rasch to develop this connection.

Specific planning decisions need to be made between the PI and the AMF2/AOS operators regarding aerosol sampling, the installation of radars aboard the Polarstern, and other operational issues.