Saildrone 2021 Arctic field campaign for the Multi-Sensor Improved SST (MISST) project

Two Saildrone unmanned surface vehicles (USV) collected data on a 90-day cruise from Dutch Harbor Alaska to the Chukchi Sea and back, during 6 July 2021 to 20 October 2021. Power issues caused the actual sampling period to end on 20 September 2021. The overall mission objective was to measure atmospheric and oceanographic conditions in Alaskan arctic waters. A special emphasis during this year’s cruise was to better understand the spatial/temporal scales of air-sea covariance in the Chukchi Sea. This was addressed by running a series of parallel tracks using the two Saildrones at varying horizontal offsets. Each Saildrone was equipped to measure air temperature and relative humidity, barometric pressure, surface skin temperature, wind speed and direction, wave height and period, seawater temperature and salinity, chlorophyll fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen. Both vehicles measured near surface currents with 300 kHz acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP). NetCDF data files here contain 1-minute averaged, georeferenced trajectory data for the USV. The project, Multi-sensor Improved Sea-Surface Temperature (MISST), is funded by NASA through the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP).