Particle tracking and Lagrangian statistics related to: "Significant variability of structure and predictability of Arctic Ocean surface pathways affects basin-wide connectivity"

Acknowledgements This work resulted from the Advective Pathways of nutrients and key Ecological substances in the Arctic (APEAR) project (NE/R012865/1, NE/R012865/2, #03V01461), part of the Changing Arctic Ocean programme, jointly funded by the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 820989 (project COMFORT, Our common future ocean in the Earth system – quantifying coupled cycles of carbon, oxygen, and nutrients for determining and achieving safe operating spaces with respect to tipping points).The work reflects only the authors' view; the European Commission and their executive agency are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information the work contains. This work also used the ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service and JASMIN, the UK collaborative data analysis facility. Satellite-based sea ice tracking was carried out as part of the Russian-German Research Cooperation QUARCCS funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under grant 03F0777A. This study was carried out as part of the international Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) with the tag MOSAiC20192020 (AWI_PS122_1 and AF-MOSAiC-1_00) and the NERC Project "PRE-MELT" (Grant NE/T000546/1=). The schematic of the ESAS in Figure 1 was adapted with permission granted by GRID-Arendal from a version downloaded on 11 Feb 2020 (see https://www.grida.no/resources/6617; persistent archived version at https://web.archive.org/web/20191018051919/http://www.grida.no/resources/6617 ). The authors would like to dedicate this paper to Maria Luneva, who enthusiastically contributed to the discussions of the initial idea of the paper and the history of the Russian North Pole drifting stations in the context of this study, but sadly passed away suddenly in 2019 before the draft of the paper was written.