There's been a good series of Leg 1 blogs up at UA Fairbanks by R Rembler that supplement those of M Shupe and BBC. These represent all that we really know -- or will ever know -- about how sea ice motion is affecting operations on the Mosaic floe.
AWI has censored and silenced all other sources in favor of relentless, uninformative
. The Carl Zeiss culture of quality is long gone; Germany today is VW diesel, AWI information management, and 21 of 103 buoys dead within days including 8 set out by AWI and 2 of 6 placed en route by the Kapitan Dranitsyn. An additional 24 floe buoys have been silenced and do not report to the international buoy tracking service.
These buoys aren't AWI's property as they seem to think; the buoys, the ship, all the equipment and the data itself are owned by taxpayers who funded Mosaic. AWI itself does not have one pfennig of its own.
As an aside, note the KD's exit swath is still quite visible today on S1AB. Scientists from Leg 1 just disembarked in Tromsø on Jan 1st; no information is available on what they observed in transit (ice thickness is always measured).
Big plans for daily bow radar release have seemingly foundered: still no coverage of Oct 4th to Oct 31, all coverage stopping on Dec 31, no response at all to polite inquiries from the designated on-shore scientific contacts, web page promises have been shelved, and annoyance expressed by the Meereis Portal communication leader that the (non-forum) public dares question map quality and delays.
Apparently quite a few outside scientists are unhappy with the kindergarten-level portal; they may not be aware Germany invented kindergarten back in 1837.
In other words, download a complete bow radar set now before it disappears forever (or gets locked down in a threatened proprietary format). It takes five to make a complete non-overlapping set: 20191101_20191114.avi, 20191115_20191128.avi, 20191201_20191214).avi, 20191215_20191228).avi and the largely redundant 20191218_20191231).avi. These are small files found at
https://data.meereisportal.de/maps/animations/Iceradar/Open each as grayscale with the free Imagej frame reader. Do not check 'virtual stack'. Under Images --> Stack --> Tools --> Concatenate, join the avi in temporal order, save as avi or gif. In ImageJ, Command-Shift-D pauses to let you to duplicate any subset of frames, for example ones flanking a certain date or all those showing major ice action.
18 Nov 2019 - A big storm By Rob Rember
https://uaf-iarc.org/author/rob-rember/
… On Friday 15 Nov 19, we were notified that the weather was going to get substantially worse over the weekend and that by Sunday winds would exceed gale force (14 m/s). On Saturday the 16th, we quickly went out to sample the first- and second-year ice sites in case our Monday coring was cancelled.
The storm came on Saturday night and continued all day Sunday the 17th as predicted. Winds consistently exceeded gale force for most of the day. The ice opened and closed in front and to the side of the ship several times. At one point from the bridge there was 50 m of open water with waves beginning to form, while on the [starboard] side the ship continued to be moored to the ice floe.
There were large cracks that opened all over our local area (ocean city, remote sensing, ROV site etc.) that stayed open for many hours. We had substantial damage to several power lines as the flow separated and came back together.
This morning the wind is still up around 15 m/s and the damage assessment has begun. We surveyed our coring sites, they are completely intact and can be reached with minimal detours. UAF science has luckily fared well. Other sites will require some major rebuilding with 700 kg power nodes tipped over as ice drifted/sheared and pulled on cables that were fixed to the power distribution hubs.
In the next 30 minutes we will have a meeting to discuss the new steps. The ice is still moving and we are not in a stable situation to begin rebuilding. Even so, the UAF team will head out this afternoon to continue the sea ice coring times series we started approximately a month ago.
I looked at GFS winds, sailwx, ship weather, Rammb, bow radar and seven enveloping S1AB images for confirmation, first noting a 2º longitude lurch in Polarstern position overnight. The big ice radar action came later, on the 19th-20th under continuing strong and strongly shifted winds.
The explanation: ship weather is measured on high and provided as hourly averages so ground level gale force gusts are depracated; GFS 'surface' winds are non-observational so the 1000hPa may be better. Both are in good agreement with Rembler's blog.
Bow radar captures 360º but 80º has been blacked out, notably the entire Mosaic floe and near-ship instrument area observed by Rember whose times, dates and wind speeds may be off because the Polarstern does not use UTC and he does not use the metric system.
I've observed a puzzling non-grasp of causality at Mosaic. Arctic winds and ice motion stress are basin-wide, not local; nothing can be predicted from ship wx point forecasts alone. One glance at the GFS forecast -- a strong, sharply curved cyclone passing repeatedly over the Polarstern at different bearings should have warned them (indeed we called it out here well in advance). It is not homogenous high winds that cause destructive ice motion but high curvature and rapid temporal change in streamlines and their bearings.
Available S1AB: note imagery from the key date of Nov 16th is missing
S1B 2019 11 22 0546 85.7341 120.8084
S1B 2019 11 22 0408 85.7353 120.8119
S1B 2019 11 22 0230 85.7352 120.8192
S1B 2019 11 21 0643 85.7429 120.9425
S1B 2019 11 21 0327 85.7446 120.9824
S1B 2019 11 20 0602 85.7656 121.6001
S1B 2019 11 20 0424 85.7643 121.5311
S1B 2019 11 19 0700 85.8011 120.5766
S1B 2019 11 19 0521 85.8020 120.4943
S1B 2019 11 19 0343 85.8009 120.4512
S1B 2019 11 18 0619 85.8510 120.7805
S1A 2019 11 18 0530 85.8556 120.8340
S1B 2019 11 18 0441 85.8609 120.9092
S1B 2019 11 17 0538 86.0462 122.4998
S1A 2019 11 17 0449 86.0532 122.4685
S1B 2019 11 17 0400 86.0595 122.4405
-+- 2019 11 16 0600 86.1243 120.4086S1B 2019 11 15 0554 86.1891 118.3766
S1B 2019 11 15 0416 86.1897 118.3522
S1A 2019 11 15 0327 86.1897 118.3386
Hourly ship weather: 60 straight hours of >10 m/s (last column)
86.1 122.4 17 11 19 0000 15
86.1 122.4 16 11 19 2300 16
86.1 122.4 16 11 19 2200 13
86.1 122.3 16 11 19 2100 14
86.1 122.2 16 11 19 2000 16
86.1 122.1 16 11 19 1900 16
86.1 122.0 16 11 19 1800 19
86.1 121.8 16 11 19 1700 19
86.2 121.6 16 11 19 1600 20
86.2 121.5 16 11 19 1500 21
86.2 121.3 16 11 19 1400 20
86.2 120.9 16 11 19 1200 19
86.2 120.8 16 11 19 1100 18
86.2 120.6 16 11 19 1000 17
86.2 120.4 16 11 19 0900 17
86.2 120.3 16 11 19 0800 17
86.2 120.1 16 11 19 0700 16
86.2 120.0 16 11 19 0600 15
86.2 119.9 16 11 19 0500 14
86.2 119.7 16 11 19 0400 12
86.2 119.6 16 11 19 0300 12
86.2 119.5 16 11 19 0200 12
86.2 119.4 16 11 19 0100 13
86.2 119.3 16 11 19 0000 13
GFS nullschool cyclonic winds:
245° @ 11.2 m/s 2019/11/16/0000Z
250° @ 12.9 m/s 2019/11/16/0300Z
250° @ 14.3 m/s 2019/11/16/0600Z
250° @ 13.5 m/s 2019/11/16/0900Z
255° @ 15.8 m/s 2019/11/16/1200Z
260° @ 14.1 m/s 2019/11/16/1500Z
275° @ 15.0 m/s 2019/11/16/1800Z
290° @ 11.1 m/s 2019/11/16/2100Z
320° @ 13.4 m/s 2019/11/17/0000Z
310° @ 10.7 m/s 2019/11/17/0300Z
315° @ 11.5 m/s 2019/11/17/0600Z
325° @ 11.6 m/s 2019/11/17/0900Z
355° @ 10.1 m/s 2019/11/17/1200Z
350° @ 13.3 m/s 2019/11/17/1800Z
360° @ 14.7 m/s 2019/11/17/2100Z
360° @ 14.9 m/s 2019/11/18/0000Z
005° @ 16.4 m/s 2019/11/18/0300Z
005° @ 13.9 m/s 2019/11/18/0600Z
010° @ 14.4 m/s 2019/11/18/1500Z
010° @ 10.2 m/s 2019/11/18/0900Z