This proposal is part of a systematic study of the Arctic environment and its role in global change which is promoted by NSF's Arctic System Science Program. It is a two year study to investigate the effect of heat input into the atmosphere produced from relatively warm water exposed by a break in polar ice. The study will use a large-eddy atmospheric model. This model explicitly simulates the convective turbulent eddies that such inhomogeneous heating creates and does not rely on assumptions of horizontal homogeneity. This simulation seeks to bridge the gap between air-sea-ice coupled models and large-scale primitive equation models, neither of which can accurately model the turbulent transfer on such time and space scales. The heat transferred upwards from the water will be analyzed to determine the amount which is recaptured by ice and the amount and location of that retained by the atmosphere.
