Water-air Column Characterisation in Arctic Region using Unmanned Vehicles

Monitoring the Arctic regions allows understanding the impact of global warming on Earth's climate but some processes affecting the climate change cannot be fully discerned because data are sparse and even missing due to difficulties in collecting them in hazardous area. This is particularly true in the proximity of the arctic calving glaciers that induce changes in the physicochemical and biological properties of the seawater. Unmanned marine and aerial vehicles allow the in-situ observing of such processes. In June 2017 CNR-ISSIA, in collaboration with other institutes of the CNR (IAMC, ISMAR, ISAC, IBIMET) and UNITUS, has conducted a measurement campaign in the Kongsfjord, a small fiord in Svalbard. A customised octocopter (OTTO) capable of carrying various types of heavy payloads was used. A set of low cost and high-resolution sensors were used to analyse the column of air in order to monitor atmospheric parameters and gases (humidity, temperature, CO, CO2, O3, NO2). A thermal camera was also installed on the drone to reconstruct a thermal map of the sea/ice in the area surveyed by the Unmanned Marine Vehicle PROTEUS equipped with underwater sensor. The measurements performed allowed to fully characterise the state of air-sea interface near marine glacier fronts. A preliminary data analysis to correlate the different measured quantities shows interesting results but further experiment need to be done to achieve a complete understanding of the processes.