Over the past few decades, Arctic shipping has increased significantly. A research collaboration across the European Nordic and Baltic countries introduces a new tool for the sector, namely sea ice related risk assessments.
In the Arctic area, the increase in air temperature over the recent decades has been even larger than the global average. This again is associated with unprecedented shrinking and thinning of the seasonal sea ice especially in coastal zones.
The changes are the main motivation for the ship navigation risk indicator application produced in the project NOrdic CryOSphere Digital Twin (NOCOS DT), funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers. The project pooled scientific resources from the participating countries to develop computational modelling of sea ice phenomena. Applications were developed in several societal sectors.
Forecasts are updated daily
Factors relevant for assessments of ship navigability in the Arctic region include sea ice concentration, ice thickness, fraction of pressure ridges and multi-year ice as well as ice speed and compression. Further, an assessment must include the ice class of the vessel.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has introduced a Risk Index Outcome (RIO) method to provide ship-specific guidelines for safe navigation in ice-infested waters.
The NOCOS DT project combined data from Copernicus (the European program for applications of data from Earth Observation satellites), Destination Earth (DestinE), and the Nordic meteorological institutes, to obtain the accurate, high-resolution sea ice information required for RIO calculations.
The forecasts include estimates for the upcoming one, two, and three days. The forecasts are updated daily.
Also relevant to fishing, hunting, cruise operators
Besides shipping, NOCOS DT applications covered other sectors affected by the changing ice conditions, including offshore construction, renewable energy, fishing, tourism, and the everyday life of indigenous people.
Another major use case related to the present and future extent of landfast ice, meaning sea ice that is locked and does not move. Landfast sea ice is important for the Greenlandic and other Arctic societies as they use it for infrastructure, fisheries, hunting, and transportation. Another sector requesting knowledge of landfast ice is cruise operators.
Landfast sea ice is also common in the Baltic in the winter, where it is used for winter roads and recreational activities such as skiing and ice fishing.
Thus, it is important to predict the stability of the landfast ice in a changing climate. In NOCOS DT, an analytic tool that diagnoses the period for landfast ice in present and future climate was developed.
The text is inspired by the article “Digital twins advancing Arctic and Baltic sea ice research and climate adaptation” at the CSC website. CSC, the national research and education network (NREN) of Finland, is a partner in the NOCOS DT project. The final software product of the project was published as an open-source repository (https://github.com/CSCfi/NOCOS). Further development building on it is ongoing in other projects.
Contributors
