Predictions Powered by Continuous, Distributed Observations

In spring 2025 a research team riding snow machines hauled scientific instruments out on to the sea ice locked to the coastline of Utqiagvik, Alaska, to establish a new observing system. Their goal: work with the local community to better forecast sea ice breakout events.

Seasonal landfast ice is a unique aspect of daily life in the Arctic. It protects the coastline from erosion, provides ecological habitat, and is used as a stable platform for travel and hunting by coastal communities. Utqiagvik residents have deep expertise observing and understanding the ice during freeze-up, how it evolves over the winter season, and when the ice will start to move before breakout. As the melt season commences, everybody is concerned about breakout events because of the significant hazards of injury and strandings.

The observatory established at Utqiagvik, designed and deployed by APL-UW and partners from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, seeks to measure the combination of environmental variables that destabilize landfast ice and precondition breakup. The effort is driven by several questions: Can we better predict coastal ice conditions by getting data straight from the ocean? How can we get these data immediately and continuously? What observations and forecasts matter most to the community?

The research team designed the observatory with scientific instruments on the ice, in the ocean, and on the seafloor to augment a land-based radar, with the goal of turning a breakout alert system into a forecasting one. With continuous data from these instruments reported in real time, “We will see the ice ‘twitching’ along the coast. We will also see the arrival of warm water that can cause melting under the ice, the accumulation of solar radiation causing surface melt, and the winds, waves, and currents that push and deform the ice,” explains Senior Principal Oceanographer Jim Thomson. “We have an underlying understanding of the processes and combination of factors that cause breakout events, and when we account for each quantitatively, we can say there is a high likelihood the ice will move.” 

Three moorings, with instruments extending through the water column, are foundational to the observatory. They were deployed in the spring through the ice, recovered during the open-water period during summer, and replaced with a set to overwinter. With temperature and pressure measurements, plus acoustic Doppler current profilers, they track ocean heat content and its propagation onshore from the deep basin. To retrieve mooring data immediately and continuously Senior Principal Oceanographers Craig Lee and Jason Gobat, with their expertise in under-ice observations by autonomous platforms, outfitted the moorings with acoustic telemetry. Here, a receiver sits on the ice while an acoustic modem transmits from the mooring on the seafloor. Gobat and Lee also prototyped and fielded a lower cost system using a thin wire to get data from the seafloor to the sea ice node.

Miniature, surface floating instruments – microSWIFTs – developed in Thomson's lab are planted out across the ice, up and down the coast in spring. Their drift with the ice is tracked by GPS. During the seasonal transition, microSWIFTs melt out of the ice and become free-drifting ocean buoys, providing up-to-date wave information to the science team and local community via integration with another APL-UW innovation: the Backyard Buoys web application. 

The observatory's assets recorded clear signals during the 2025 transition season. Upwelled water arrived underneath the ice and there were multiple occasions of offshore pack ice colliding with the landfast ice, providing significant mechanical forcing. As analyses continue the team is implementing new, more sensitive accelerometers on the microSWIFTs for the 2026 field campaign to detect very small motions in the landfast ice.  Team members are developing a high-resolution numerical model to represent ocean and sea ice conditions near Utqiagvik. Such a model could be embedded into weather service products, because the community is already accustomed to using them.

Pacific Infrastructure Supporting Continuous Engineering & Science — PISCES

The collaborative effort at Utqiagvik is an Arctic implementation of the APL-UW PISCES initiative. This project and those centered in the Pacific Northwest are organized to achieve several major goals: