Aagaard/Swift The interannual variability of water properties in the Arctic Ocean will be investigated with a carefully defined statistical reduction of the data set used to prepare the multi-year gridded fields recently released under the Gore- Chernomyrdin environmental bilateral agreement. The statistical work will be conducted in collaboration with Russian colleagues at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersburg. The purpose of the work is: (1) to carefully examine the Arctic Ocean temperature field from the various basins on a year-to-year basin; (2) to relate the fluctuations to changes in atmospheric forcing in the source regions; and (3) to test the hypothesis that the Arctic Ocean fluctuations are correlated with the North Atlantic Oscillation.
