Data from Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea research projects

Research efforts

PMEL has been conducting research in the Bering Strait region since the early 1980's Projects were intended to study sea ice formation and drift, sea-ice forcast model enhancement and vessel icing. Areas studied included Bering Strait, Barrow Canyon, and the Chukchi Sea.

Ice buoys were deployed near St. Lawrence as part of the Arctic Polyna Experiment (APEX) during the winter of 1986. The buoy deployment was intended to study sea ice drift in the vicinity of Bering Strait in order to provide a better basis for extending sea-ice forcasting models in this region. The broader goals of APEX included understanding the relative effects of baroclinic currents due to brine rejection during the freezing of ice in the St. Lawrence polyna, of baroclonic currents due to set-up of water on the shelf by the wind, of internal ice stress due to their presence of the island and of other forces on the motion of the ice in the Bering Strait region.

Data

On-line access to CTD station data and sectional cross plots is available. Access to download data from individual casts in either ASCII or netCDF format is included. A variety of plots of properties versus depth and property vs property plots can be generated on the fly and displayed to your screen.

ARGOS drifter data, bottle data and CTD data are accessible via a numberof data selection utilities. These utilities allow you to search the database of rescued data and extract datasets meeting criteria such as geographic location, date and time, season of the year, type of data collected and various other criteria.

About Bering Strait

strait between siberia and alaska max depth 170 feet separatec Chuckchi Penn and Seward Penin. 55 miles wide Frozen October to June Diomede Islands in center of strait

Information extracted from the Standard Encyclopedia of the World's Oceans and Islands edited by Anthony Huxley. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1962