Product Description
Sea ice is susceptible to tension forces and compression occurs when ice is pushed together by converging winds or currents. Sea ice pressure can lead to ship besetting and damages (Lemieux et al., 2020) and poses great risk for navigation. Some of the areas where ice compression occurs can be estimated based on ice deformation indicators based on SAR ice motion, and these indicators are very useful in the validation of ice models trying to forecast ice compression for ice navigation (Karvonen, 2012).
The estimate (and forecast) of compression and divergence of the ice field is currently based on outputs of sea ice forecasting systems. The ‘true’ ice drift, obtained tracking the ice features from a SAR image to another, would be very useful to drive the model outputs, but overlapping SAR images are currently acquired at too long time intervals – several hours in the best case – which does not allow to estimate the drift at high spatial resolution, a necessary condition to estimate convergence and divergence of the drift field.
Product Specifications
BUSINESS PROCESS | SD, IN, SO |
DESCRIPTION | Sea ice compression / divergence estimated by modelled sea ice drift. |
EO INFORMATION OF INTEREST | Sea ice x velocity (SIUV), Sea ice y velocity (SIUV) |
MAIN PROCESS STEPS | Calculation of convergence/divergence of the sea ice drift, geo-spatial data filtering |
INPUT DATA SOURCE | Outputs from the neXtSIM sea ice model |
SPATIAL RESOLUTION AND COVERAGE | Ice drift available on the 3 x 3km grid over the Arctic Ocean, grid of convergence/divergence to be defined |
ACCURACY / CONSTRAINS | Not available |
LIMITATIONS | Limited availability of ground truth. The interpretation of data can indeed be challenging, especially when handled by personnel without extensive experience in the field. |
TEMPORAL RESOLUTION | Hourly |
FREQUENCY UPDATE | Daily (output of the neXtSIM sea ice model) |
DELIVERY / OUTPUT FORMAT | To be defined (raster, shapefiles, NETCDF) |
ACCESSIBILITY | Copernicus marine Service and Artic hub (Ice drift datasets) |