Climate change causes a steady decline of sea ice in the polar regions, leading to increased shipping activities in high latitudes. However, the current availability and accuracy of sea ice information fails to meet these increasing user demands. In FAST-CAST 2, the successor of the project MAP-BORealis, Sentinel-1 data and weather forecasts are analyzed and optimized routes are generated automatically employing AI.
For routing, not only the current sea ice situation is relevant, but also the predicted sea ice dynamics are a crucial factor for the quality of the recommended route. Our task is to validate the route predictions by adapting our existing sea ice drift processor and to develop a new processor to detect areas of converging and diverging sea ice movement, indicating hazardous areas often impassable even for ice breakers.
RV Polarstern in the central Arctic (Photo: Stefan Hendricks) and a Sentinel-1 image with a possible route through the ice. (Source: DriftNoise GmbH)