Winter MIZEX 87, Operations Overview

MIZEX (Marginal Ice Zone Experiment), a multinational, interdisciplinary study of the Arctic environment, has the overall goal to better understand the mesoscale interaction of ice, ocean, and atmosphere at the polar margin. Winter MIZEX is the natural extension of the successful 1983-84 Summer programs and this paper presents an overview of the MIZEX 87 operations, March 19 to April 13, 1987. Principal scientific areas studied were: oceanography, meteorology, remote sensing, ice and waves, acoustics, and biology. Operations benefitted greatly from SAR imagery, downlinked daily, in near real-time, directly from SAR aircraft to POLAR CIRCLE. Preliminary reviews of just part of all the data acquired during MIZEX 87, indicate that knowledge of the Arctic enviorment will expand significantly when all the data are evaluated.