Time series of freshwater, heat, and volume fluxes through Barrow Strait in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago

In 1998 the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) began a concerted effort to monitor ocean currents and water properties in Barrow Strait in the Canadian Northwest Passage. Barrow Strait (part of Lancaster Sound) is one of three pathways for export from the Arctic Ocean through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA). The resulting time series of freshwater and volume transports, measured continuously until 2011, has proven to be a critical measurement for understanding variability in downstream regions (particularly Baffin Bay, The Labrador shelf, and Eastern Canada) as well as an important diagnostic for validation of models of the Arctic region. Moored monitoring along the Barrow Strait transect was restarted in 2017, and data recovered in summer 2019 permit evaluation of trends and changes in variability of the fluxes in the intervening years. We present here an updated time series of water properties and fluxes from Barrow Strait, including a discussion of ice properties and ecosystem changes.