S1

The mooring S1, operational since June 2014, is located in the eastern Fram Strait, south-West offshore Svalbard region. Here, water masses, strongly influenced by the interaction between Atlantic and Arctic waters and by local atmospheric forcing, substantially contribute to driving the global thermohaline circulation.

In this region, there is remarkable variability in the system due to several forcing mechanisms (e.g., atmospheric, internal, tidal, and shelf dynamics) that play an important role, especially in the upper layer. On the contrary, it is not completely clear which processes are responsible for the inter-annual and seasonal deep flow variability in the western offshore Spitsbergen region.

The mooring S1 is specifically designed to collect ocean parameters (temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, particulate flux, ocean currents) in the deep layer, covering approximately the last 150-250 m of the water column. From 2022 it collects data from 500m depth to the bottom.

The mooring was deployed for the first time in June 2014 in the framework of the Eurofleets project PREPARED. It is maintained by OGS and CNR-ISP (Italy), and since 2017 with the collaboration of the Italian Navy Hydrographic Institute. From 2022, S1 gained the contribution of the NATO CMRE, which implemented the observatory with more sensors to collect data in the Atlantic Water layer.