ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06
1aAO6. Are faster than predicted arrival times seeing Arctic Ocean
warming?
Peter N. Mikhalevsky
Sci. Appl. Intl. Corp., McLean, VA 22102
Alexander Gavrilov
Andreev Inst. of Acoust., Moscow, Russia
Arthur B. Baggeroer
MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139
Arrival times of M sequences transmitted across the Arctic in the spring
of 1994 during the trans-Arctic acoustic propagation (TAP) experiment [P. N.
Mikhalevsky, 2851(A) (1994)] are faster than modeled arrival times
using historical climatology. The modal dependence of the travel times appears
to be consistent with a warming of the Atlantic intermediate water (AIW) in the
Arctic Ocean. Calculations of the effects of this type of climate change
signal, as well as ambient variability on the modal arrival times, will be
presented. The possibility that the TAP results are consistent with new reports
of AIW warming in the Arctic [Carmack et al., Geophys. Res. Lett. (in press)
and K. Aagaard and E. C. Carmack, Science 266 (23 December 1994)] will be
discussed. [Work supported by ONR, ARPA, and the Ministry of Science, Russian
Federation.]