Changing Arctic Ocean Programme oceanographic dataset (2017-present)

The Changing Arctic Ocean (CAO) oceanographic dataset comprises data collected in the Arctic Ocean, including the Barents Sea and Fram Strait, as part of the Changing Arctic Ocean programme. The data were collected over multiple research cruises starting in June 2017. The majority of these cruises were conducted during the Arctic summer on board the RRS James Clark Ross, with further winter cruises completed in collaboration with the Nansen Legacy project on board the RV Helmer Hanssen. Shipboard data collection included the deployment of conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) packages, ocean seagliders, mulitcorers, grabs, nets, trawls, and a shelf underwater camera system. The CAO programme aims to understand the changes in Arctic marine ecosystem in a quantifiable way, enabling computer models to help predict the consequences of these changes on, for example; surface ocean productivity; species distributions; food webs; and ecosystems, and the services they provide (ecosystem services). It was initially a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded programme comprising four projects: Arctic PRIZE (Arctic productivity in the seasonal ice zone), led by Finlo Cottier (Scottish Association for Marine Science - SAMS); ARISE (Can we detect changes in Arctic ecosystems?), led by Claire Mahaffey (University of Liverpool); ChAOS (The Changing Arctic Ocean Seafloor), led by Christian Maerz (University of Leeds) and DIAPOD (Mechanistic understanding of the role of diatoms in the success of the Arctic Calanus complex and implications for a warmer Arctic), led by David Pond (University of Stirling). Additional projects were added to the programme in July 2018 through funding provided by NERC and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The majority of data are held by the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) but a proportion of the data, primarily biological, are stored at the British Antarctic Survey Polar Data Centre (polardatacentre@bas.ac.uk) and any BMBF funded data are held by Pangaea (https://www.pangaea.de/).