2006 Western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) Advisory Committee eTown Meeting

The Western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) Advisory Committee and Project Office sponsored this eTown Meeting to provide an open forum to discuss implementation objectives and planning for SBI Phase III and to solicit community input for a systems approach to understanding arctic shelf-basin dynamics.

A second SBI Town Hall Meeting will be held in conjunction with the 2006 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii on 22 February 2006. More information about the Hawaii meeting is available at the bottom of this page.

The goal of the ongoing SBI project is to improve our understanding of the impacts of global change on the physical and biogeochemical connections among the continental shelves, slopes, and deep basins of the western Arctic. SBI was designed through cooperative science planning to include three phases: Phase I (1999-2001) included retrospective synthesis, opportunistic sampling and modeling; Phase II (2002-2006) is the on-going multi-year field program and modeling effort in the Amerasian Arctic; and the planned Phase III (2007-2009) will be the synthesis and modeling component.

SBI Phase III will produce syntheses from the regional to the entire Arctic and, in some cases, the entire global ecosystem in the context of SBI objectives. The SBI Advisory Committee anticipate that results from the SBI Phase I and II data sets will form the basis of western Arctic synthesis studies and may also include results from coincident field programs that occurred during the SBI program to date. Projects would examine broad scale implications of these results in order to develop a better systems understanding of shelf-basin interactions in the Arctic and its connection to global processes.