Ship traffic in the Arctic is rising, but navigational decisions in ice-infested seas are still subject to great uncertainty, even if sufficient remote sensing information and weather forecasts are available. It is hard to access and analyze large amounts of data manually on board a ship. Innovative approaches are required to translate the abundance of data into decision-making support. The aim of MAP-BORealis was to investigate to what extent it is possible to give optimized route recommendations using spaceborne ice information. Therefore, a tool chain was prototyped that initially generated a sea ice map from SAR data. The map represents various features of the sea ice that play a role in navigation. The ice map was then projected forward at hour intervals after the acquisition time with the help of a forecast model, to create a series of sea ice maps. Based on this series, specific route recommendations were calculated.
Visualization of a calculated example route. The ship reaches its destination (top right) after about 10 hours of travel. It should be noted that the drift of the sea ice that affects the route is not shown here. Source: C. Eis, University Bremen