ALBERT

Description: We present sea ice temperature and salinity data from first-year ice (FYI) and second-year ice (SYI) relevant to the temporal development of sea ice permeability and brine drainage efficiency from the early growth phase in October 2019 to the onset of spring warming in May 2020. Our dataset was collected in the central Arctic Ocean during the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) Expedition in 2019 to 2020. MOSAiC was an international transpolar drift expedition in which the German icebreaker RV Polarstern anchored into an ice floe to gain new insights into Arctic climate over a full annual cycle. In October 2019, RV Polarstern moored to an ice floe in the Siberian sector of the Arctic at 85 degrees north and 137 degrees east to begin the drift towards the North Pole and the Fram Strait via the Transpolar Drift Stream. The data presented here were collected during the first three legs of the expedition, so all the coring activities took place on the same floe. The end dates of legs 1, 2, and 3 were 13 December, 24 February, and 4 June, respectively. The dataset contributed to a baseline study entitled, Deciphering the properties of different Arctic ice types during the growth phase of the MOSAiC floes: Implications for future studies. The study highlights downward directed gas pathways in FYI and SYI by inferring sea ice permeability and potential brine release from several time series of temperature and salinity measurements. The physical properties presented in this paper lay the foundation for subsequent analyses on actual gas contents measured in the ice cores, as well as air-ice and ice-ocean gas fluxes. Sea ice cores were collected with a Kovacs Mark II 9 cm diameter corer. To measure ice temperatures, about 4.5 cm deep holes were drilled into the core (intervals varied by site and leg) . The temperatures were measured by a digital thermometer within minutes after the cores were retrieved. The ice cores were placed into pre-labelled plastic sleeves sealed at the bottom end. The ice cores were transported to RV Polarstern and stored in a -20 degrees Celsius freezer. Each of the cores was sub-sampled, melted at room temperature, and processed for salinity within one or two days. The practical salinity was estimated by measuring the electrical conductivity and temperature of the melted samples using a WTW Cond 3151 salinometer equipped with a Tetra-Con 325 four-electrode conductivity cell. The practical salinity represents the the salinity estimated from the electrical conductivity of the solution. The dataset also contains derived variables, including sea ice density, brine volume fraction, and the Rayleigh number.

Description: Discrete seawater samples for dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and total alkalinity (TA) were collected from the Polarstern (https://sensor.awi.de/?site=search&q=vessel:polarstern:ctd_sbe9plus_321) and Ocean City (https://sensor.awi.de/?site=search&q=vessel:polarstern:ctd_sbe9plus_935) CTD/Rosette systems during the Multidisciplinary drifting observatory for the study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition, 20 September 2019 – 14 October 2020. Following Dickson et al. (2007), seawater samples were collected between 30 October 2019 and 28 September 2020 in borosilicate (3.3) bottles (250 ml), fixed with saturated mercuric chloride (HgCl₂) solution (100 µl), capped with greased (Apiezon® L) ground glass stoppers secured by insulating tape, and stored dark +4°C until post-cruise analysis at the Institute of Marine Research (IMR, Norway), University of East Anglia (UEA, UK), and Hokkaido University (Japan). DIC was determined by coulometric titration (Johnson et al., 1985) using a Versatile INstrument for the Determination of Total inorganic carbon and titration Alkalinity (VINDTA 3C, Marianda, Germany) at UEA, a VINDTA 3D at IMR, and a custom-built extraction system at Hokkaido University (Ono et al., 1998). TA was determined by potentiometric titration using a VINDTA 3C at UEA, a Versatile Instrument for the Determination of Titration Alkalinity (VINDTA 3S, Marianda, Germany) at IMR, and a TA analyzer ATT-05 (Kimoto Electric Co., Ltd., Japan) at Hokkaido University. The accuracy for both DIC and TA was set at IMR and UEA by routine analysis of certified reference material (CRM batch #182, #191) distributed by A. G. Dickson (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, USA). Reference materials (Batch AR and AU; KANSO Technos Co., Ltd., Osaka, Japan), traceable to the Scripps CO₂ CRM, were used at Hokkaido University. Analytical precision for DIC and TA content is 〈 ±2 μmol/kg and 〈 ±2 μmol/kg, respectively, based on CRM replicates. Based on secondary quality control (Jutterström et al., 2010; Tanhua et al., 2010), DIC and TA were adjusted by -8 µmol/kg and -23 µmol/kg, respectively, for events PS122/1_7-49, PS122/1_8-46, PS122/1_9-50, and PS122/1_10-45. Data quality is indicated by flags following the consolidated WOCE system of Jiang et al. (2022).