Added value and data information

Despite the increasing accuracy of weather forecasts, marine masters still report significant differences between e.g. ice drift forecast and reality in polar regions. IcySea helps these professionals by providing improved sea-ice drift forecasts.

The forecasts range 10 days into the future and cover the area around the Svalbard archipelago with a spatial resolution of 12.5 km . In the IcySea app the forecasts will be visualized with points anticipating the future location of ice patches. The IcySea sea-ice forecasts are improved by means of machine learning techniques developed at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Comparisons between the Arctic Ocean Physics Analysis and Forecast data product and our optimized forecasts against real observations showed the error for the ice drift speed is reduced from roughly 3500 m/day to 3100 m/day (11.5 %), whilst the error for the drift direction is reduced from on average 45° to 41° (5%).

IcySea is meant to be an actionable application and as such it makes the data available to the user in Near Real Time. In particular:

Sea Ice Concentration:

Near Real Time, up to 8 updates in a day

Ice Charts:

Weekly updates, Arctic-wide and Ross Sea, Antarctica

Optimized Drift:

Daily updates

Sentinel-1 images:

Near Real Time, 2-3 updates in a day for a given area

MODIS optical images:

Daily updates

Surface temperature:

Daily updates

Approximate data usage information

When using a satellite data connection it is important to know how much data is transferred when installing and using the IcySea application. Below is a list of approximate data usage amounts for various aspects of the application: