The dominant oceanic heat source for the Arctic Ocean is inflow of Atlantic Water (AW) combined with export of Polar Water and ice through Fram Strait. The West Spitsbergen Current (WSC) is a major pathway for heat and volume transport to the Arctic Ocean (Aagaard & Greisman, 1975), and it is especially the part of the WSC confined over the upper part of the continental slope of Svalbard (i.e. the warm core of the WSC) which feeds the major input of sensible heat into the Arctic Ocean (Gammelsrod & Rudels, 1983, Aagaard et al., 1987, Schauer et al., 2004, Nilsen et.al., 2006).

The Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar- und Meeresforschung (AWI, Ursula Schauer) has an ongoing monitoring programme on the WSC through 7 current meter mooring (Fahrbach et al., 2001, Schauer et al., 2004), which forms a central component of DAMOCLES. Recent studies have shown that this mooring section can be used to calculate the heat loss through isopycnal diffusion in the layers below the surface layer (Nilsen et.al., 2006), but that the section is not able to fully capture the water mass exchange between the slope and the West Spitsbergen shelf areas. Hence, we will extend this mooring section by one new mooring exactly at the slope break in order to capture the strongest signal in the topographically vorticity wave field.