This Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) project will provide for the access to and compilation of a unique data base of in situ, daily averaged measurements of solar and terrestrial surface radiation over the central Arctic Basin. These data were collected from a series of Soviet drifting ice stations from 1950 to 1991. No comparable data exists anywhere. Russian researchers from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St. Petersburg have recently agreed to make this singular and large data set available to U.S. investigators. The data will be transposed from hand-written logs and archived on CD-ROM for distribution to the U.S. academic community. The data have multidisciplinary applications relevant to global change research, including climatology, oceanography, sea ice studies, meteorology, radiative transfer, remote sensing, and forecast modeling. Having this high quality and comprehensive Russian information available soon to the U.S. research community is timely for planning new U.S. Arctic Ocean research programs.
