Advancing sea ice monitoring in the Canadian Arctic

Accurate and timely sea ice information dissemination is critical to northern communities since sea ice is an integral part of their livelihood. The proposed research project aims to provide improved sea ice information to the coastal communities by overcoming current observational limitations. This will be achieved by utilizing dense time-series satellite imagery acquired from RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) and Sentinel 1a/b (S1) imagery.

Very recently, satellite imagery from RADARSAT-2 (R-2) has been replaced by RCM imagery for ice chart preparation in the Canadian Arctic. Although RCM promises to acquire satellite imagery with higher temporal resolution, S1 has been acquiring imagery in high resolution over the Arctic region. Previous studies has demonstrated that combining R-2 and S-1 datasets can provide more reliable sea ice information (e.g., melt onset timing). However, no operational service maximizes the potential of the dense coverage of RCM+S1 for community ice chart preparation. A targeted approach (e.g., automated techniques) is needed to make use the incredible amount of imagery available. If we don’t take that approach, a lot of valuable information could be lost or go unused.

This project plans to provide a high-resolution ice chart to northern communities during ice formation and break-up season when ice conditions change rapidly, affecting ice travel and livelihood. The outcomes of this research (i.e., improved high-spatio-temporal ice chart) will also assist in finding safe shipping routes through the northwest passage (NWP) in the Canadian Arctic by avoiding thick hazardous ice, which is critical for safe ship navigation as shipping activities in Canadian Arctic has increased substantially in recent years. Nonetheless, this project will strengthen MEOPAR’s marine risk and resilience capacity by resolving real-world problems (MEOPAR strategic focus of Cycle II) and contribute to ArcticNet’s research mandate by addressing critical sea ice challenges in the Canadian coastal Arctic.