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ABSTRACT. The dramatic reduction of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will increase human activities in the coming years. This activity will be driven by increased demand for energy and the marine resources of an Arctic Ocean accessible to ships. Oil and gas exploration, fisheries, mineral extraction, marine transportation, research and development, tourism, and search and rescue will increase the pressure on the vulnerable Arctic environment. Technologies that allow synoptic in situ observations year-round are needed to monitor and forecast changes in the Arctic atmosphere-ice-ocean system at daily, seasonal, annual, and decadal scales. These data can inform and enable both sustainable development and enforcement of international Arctic agreements and treaties, while protecting this critical environment. In this paper, we discuss multipurpose acoustic networks, including subsea cable components, in the Arctic. These networks provide communication, power, underwater and under-ice navigation, passive monitoring of ambient sound (ice, seismic, biologic, and anthropogenic), and acoustic remote sensing (tomography and thermometry), supporting and complementing data collection from platforms, moorings, and vehicles. We support the development and implementation of regional to basin-wide acoustic networks as an integral component of a multidisciplinary in situ Arctic Ocean observatory.

Oceanography is evolving from a shipbased expeditionary science to a distributed, observatory‐based approach in which scientists continuously interact with instruments in the field. These new capabilities will facilitate the collection of long‐term time series while also providing an interactive capability to conduct experiments using data streaming in real time. The U.S. National Science Foundation has funded the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), which over the next 5 years will deploy infrastructure to expand scientists' ability to remotely study the ocean. The OOI is deploying infrastructure that spans global, regional, and coastal scales. A global component will address planetary‐scale problems using a new network of moored buoys linked to shore via satellite telecommunications. A regional cabled observatory will “wire” a single region in the northeastern Pacific Ocean with a high‐speed optical and power grid. The coastal component will expand existing coastal observing assets to study the importance of high‐frequency forcing on the coastal environment.

The numerical model simulation of thunderstorms in three spatial dimensions and time is leading to improved understanding of severe storm structure and evolution. The results from one of these simulations is presented using a variety of display techniques to illustrate the water and ice structure of a severe storm, how air moves and rotates in and around the storm, and how different physical processes influence storm rotation near the ground. The visualization of the data was a team effort, and the accompanying video illustrates the value of animation in studying complex fluid flow problems and the kind of visualization tools that will be readily available to most researchers in the near future.