Arctic Sea Ice Monitoring Sensor Network Development

The Arctic is warming between two and four times faster than the rest of the earth, contributing to a significant decline in Arctic sea ice volume. Knowledge of why, how and the pace of change in response to this warming is critical to understanding global climate change. Unfortunately, due to the harsh conditions and difficulty of access, sensing of temperature, salinity, currents, and ice thickness is difficult, resulting in a data set that is sparse both spatially and temporally. Over the last three years, researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the University of New Hampshire have been executing a campaign to design and deploy an unattended, low-cost, distributed sensor network. Such a network would be comprised of multiple configurable sensor nodes that would each measure a vertical slice of the environment above, on and below the ice. In this paper the development process of that sensor node is described, including over 20 person-days living on ice floes and culminating with a full four-node sensor array deployment at the US Navy's Operation Ice Camp 2024.