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Research Project: IRIS
IRIS - Ice Ridging Information for Decision Making in Shipping Operations
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Runtime:
2003-01-01
until
2005-12-31
Contact:
Nick Hughes
Project coordination:
Dr. Risto Jalonen - Helsinki University of Technology,; Ship Laboratory, Box 5300, 02015 HUT, Finland. +358-9-451-3477
Contractor(s):
European Union - FP5 - EVK3-CT-2002-00083
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Background
The SAR remote sensing of sea ice has expanded rapidly. One of the raison d'être's is that shipping activities expect benefits from the ice imagery. This has been succesful only up to a point. Most of the ice cover is deformed and the navigational difficulty depends mainly on the degree of deformation which, however, cannot yet be derived from SAR imagery. The most important characteristics is the amount of ridging. Ridges are elongated deformation features with a roughly triangular cross-sectional shape. They have thicknesses up to 30 m in the Baltic and up to 60 m in the Arctic, and they comprise up to 70% of the total ice volume.
Ridging is described by ridge density (number or ridges per km) and by ridge height. These parameters can be used to estimate the navigational difficulty, for example ship travel time. However, it is not quite enough if only methods to derive ridging parameters from SAR images are developed. The in advance planning of shipping operations requires forecasting of ridging. So called dynamic ice models can supply forecasts but presently these do not include ridging parameters. Deformed ice cover is described by its thickness only. Thickness cannot be determined from SAR images which then cannot be used effectively to determine the initial values the models need. On the other hand, it is much feasible that the ridging parameters, which are observable from the surface, can determined from the SAR images. If the dynamic ice models forecasted ridging parameters instead, the joint problem of ridge parameter determination from the SAR images, and the initialisation of the models by the images, could be tackled as a mutual feedback process.
Objectives
The overall target is to develop ice modelling and SAR interpretation so that ridging parameters are obtained, to include the parameters into systems of ice information delivery, to relate the parameters to the trafficability of ships, and finally to apply the enhanced ice information in ship route selection.Thus there are three major objectives:
- Include quantitative parameters of ice cover ridging into ice dynamics models, develop methods of determining ridging parameters from satellite imagery, and verify the results by ground truth experiments.
- Determine the effect of ridging to ship transit, use this knowledge to describe the ship passage in variable ice cover and, based on that, develop tools that can used in route selection.
- Include ridging parameters to ice charts and ice model forecasts, supply this ice information to ships and display it with a terminal software, implement the routing tools as an integral part of the software, and verify the applicability by routine ship operations.
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