CODAR HF Radars Deployed in Beaufort Sea
Release Date: 5 December 2004

Anchorage, Alaska. In a four-year cooperative initiative, a team of U.S. organizations is setting up high frequency (HF) Doppler radar stations along the Beaufort Sea’s central coast. The CODAR HF radar units, which measure surface currents and other parameters, will be used during open water and mixed ice periods from June through October 2005 and 2006. The units will then be moved to Cook Inlet to measure surface currents for one full year beginning in October 2006 and ending in November 2007.

The initiative is a joint effort of the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), under the umbrella of the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP).

In late September, one week after the contract was awarded, the scientific team field tested the HF radar instruments on Alaska’s North Slope in preparation for their June 2005 deployment.

“We have taken advantage of the open water conditions during early October in the Beaufort Sea to test the Doppler radar units for the distance from shore that we will be able to map surface currents, which is typically 50 miles. Initial results collected during the week of October 4, 2004, indicate that we can ‘see’ over the barrier islands into the open Beaufort Sea,” says principal investigator Dave Musgrave, associate professor for marine science at UAF’s School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. “These units have the capability to map the surface currents every hour on a two-dimensional grid of points separated by one mile in each direction. We will deploy the units in 2005, which will give us the first quantitative look at the spatial patterns of surface currents in the Beaufort Sea and how they vary with time.”

MMS’s Alaska office is a member of the Alaska Offshore Observing System (AOOS), a regional Integrated Ocean Observation System (IOOS) effort. The IOOS is being designed as a “federation” of such “regional” associations nationwide. The study is one of MMS’s contributions to the Alaska program. If the study is successful, then AOOS believes such radars could be stationed along key parts of the more than six thousand miles of Alaska coastline to improve oceanographic information.

Full press release at www.mms.gov/alaska