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REVIEW article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1400479
This article is part of the Research Topic The State of Knowledge from Operational Ice Service Perspectives: Previous and Future Mandates View all 11 articles

The MET Norway Ice Service: A comprehensive review of the historical and future evolution, ice chart creation, and end user interaction within METAREA XIX

Provisionally accepted
William Copeland William Copeland *Penelope Wagner Penelope Wagner Nick Hughes Nick Hughes Alistair Everett Alistair Everett Trond Robertsen Trond Robertsen
  • Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The MET Norway Ice Service (NIS) celebrated its fiftieth year as a formal operational sea ice information provider in 2020. Prior to the 1970's, support to navigation had started off with ad-hoc observations from coastal stations on Svalbard in the 1930's, before developing as a research programme in the 1960's. Activity in the region has steadily increased, and now the NIS also supports a large number of research, tourist, and resource exploration vessels, in addition to the ice chart archive being a resource for climate change research. The Ice Service has always been at the forefront in the use of satellite Earth Observation technologies, beginning with the routine use of optical thermal infrared imagery from NASA TIROS and becoming a large user of Canadian RADARSAT-2 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and then European Copernicus Sentinel-1, in the 2000's and 2010's. Initially ice charts were a weekly compilation of ice information using cloud-free satellite coverage, aerial reconnaissance, and in situ observations, drawn on paper at the offices of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) in Oslo. From 1997 production moved to the Tromsø office using computer-based Geographical Information System (GIS) software and the NIS developed the ice charting system Bifrost. This allowed the frequency of production to be increased to every weekday, with a greater focus on detailed sea ice concentrations along the ice edge and coastal zones in Eastern Greenland and in the Svalbard fjords. From 2010, the NIS has also provided a weekly austral summer ice chart for the Weddell Sea and Antarctic Peninsula. To further develop its capabilities, NIS engages in a number of national and international research projects and led the EU Horizon 2020 project, Key Environmental monitoring for Polar Latitudes and European Readiness (KEPLER) . This paper summarises the overall mandate and history of the NIS, and its current activities including the current state of routine production of operational ice charts at the NIS for maritime safety in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and future development plans.

    Keywords: sea ice (Arctic), Arctic, Norway, Svalbard, Barents, Fram Strait

    Received: 13 Mar 2024; Accepted: 10 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Copeland, Wagner, Hughes, Everett and Robertsen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: William Copeland, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway

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