S.H.E.B.A. – Measuring Ice

Dick Moritz is the director of the SHEBA Project Office. SHEBA is the acronym for Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean.

“The ice cover is continually in motion. The piece of ice you are on may be moving at a different rate than the piece right next door. This causes a continually opening and closing pack ice, and creates openings that we call leads, and where it closes and ridges up, we get large thickness changes associated with ridges.

“One of the things that SHEBA is studying are the leads that open up during the summertime and don’t freeze over. And these are the sites where a large amount of this sunlight is absorbed by the system. So to study this we’ve got small, remote vehicles that can actually be programmed to run a course under the water, going through an opening and then under the adjacent ice, sampling temperature, salinity and other variables related to the heat flow and then come back to their starting point and the data is downloaded there.”

With all the data that’s been gathered in the Arctic over the past year, scientists hope to be able to better understand the dynamics of the polar weather system, and ultimately to use that information to configure more refined global climate models. That would mean better ways of predicting tomorrow’s or next year’s weather.

Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation.

S.H.E.B.A. - Measuring Ice

The ridges and abysses formed by moving plates of Arctic ice hold a wealth of information about the way our planet absorbs heat.
Air Date:10/21/1998
Scientist:
Transcript:

Dick Moritz is the director of the SHEBA Project Office. SHEBA is the acronym for Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean.

"The ice cover is continually in motion. The piece of ice you are on may be moving at a different rate than the piece right next door. This causes a continually opening and closing pack ice, and creates openings that we call leads, and where it closes and ridges up, we get large thickness changes associated with ridges.

"One of the things that SHEBA is studying are the leads that open up during the summertime and don't freeze over. And these are the sites where a large amount of this sunlight is absorbed by the system. So to study this we've got small, remote vehicles that can actually be programmed to run a course under the water, going through an opening and then under the adjacent ice, sampling temperature, salinity and other variables related to the heat flow and then come back to their starting point and the data is downloaded there."

With all the data that's been gathered in the Arctic over the past year, scientists hope to be able to better understand the dynamics of the polar weather system, and ultimately to use that information to configure more refined global climate models. That would mean better ways of predicting tomorrow's or next year's weather.

Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation.