The EU Damocles Integrated Project and the IPY iAOOS Connection

In the context of the International Polar Year, the European Union has launched an ambitious program, the so- called integrated project DAMOCLES for Developing Arctic Modelling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environment Studies. Formal extensions of DAMOCLES towards the East (Russia and Belarus) and the West (USA) with the Search for Damocles EU-US initiative and further implications and cooperations with national programs such as SPACE (Germany), NABOS (USA), iAOOS-Norway, NP35 (Russia), enhances the contribution of DAMOCLES to the integrated Arctic Ocean Observing System (iAOOS) IPY labelled project. The main goals of DAMOCLES are to better understand the fate of Arctic Sea-Ice related to changes in the atmospheric and oceanic circulations in the context of a global warming and consequences related to a predicted disappearance of arctic sea-ice in summertime or in other words a disappearance of the Arctic perennial ice. The most advanced numerical models and innovative high technology are used and developed respectively to collect and select sensitive data over a wide range of space and time scales in the lower atmosphere, in the upper ocean and through the sea-ice all over the Arctic Ocean. Important preliminary results have already been obtained such as a surprisingly abundant formation of frazil ice during winter and a very significant acceleration of the transpolar sea-ice drift across the Arctic Ocean. In this presentation we will describe some of these early results and introduce the whole range of on-going and scheduled DAMOCLES/iAOOS activities in the near future during IPY.