About this Research Topic
Operational ice services provide routine information to support maritime safety in ice-affected waters. While maintaining responsibility for their national authoritative areas, the ice services work within a collaborative global community to coordinate activities and share data, knowledge, and resources. Historic data analyzed by sea ice and iceberg experts provides an invaluable archive of information to validate derived satellite data products and forecast models. Marine operations in ice-covered areas are becoming more dynamic with the changing climate, resulting in increased demand for ice information in both quantity and quality. While large volumes of data are becoming available from earth observation satellites, and forecasts from environmental models are increasing in accuracy, the ice services are reliant on new research to reduce data to real-world information for decisions to improve navigation safety. This issue focuses on utilizing research in the monitoring and forecasting of sea ice and iceberg conditions in the operational environment.
National ice and weather services are considered the authoritative source to provide routine information in order for the public to make informed decisions for safety, life and property and we operate under the same guidelines and align with common WMO standards. This facilitates critical information exchanges between different national services and agencies and ensures forecasters comply with similar operating specifications/competencies, when providing vital information for communities. National ice services will need to expand their portfolios to include additional sea-ice parameters in routine ice charts and offer more short-to-midterm sea-ice forecasts that are developed at spatial resolutions necessary for safe navigation through ice-encumbered areas. This effort and data assimilation will require the implementation of intelligent automation techniques that have not been demonstrated by the current suite of products available at data centers. This special issue will aim to accomplish the following goals with 1) the dissemination of how individual ice services operate and their mandates, 2) communicate relevant research that will be required to support maritime activities in the future and 3) mitigate confusion between data and operational centers to present clear examples of potentially useful research that is being done with the complimentary submissions of research papers that are expected to be included in this journal.
This Research Topic welcomes submissions on:
1. Individual operational ice service mandates (past, present and future), descriptions of individual routine products including ice charts, forecast and climatology products, and validation metrics.
2. Automatic sea ice classification using multi-frequency SAR band synergies
3. Automated ice mapping supervised and unsupervised classification for navigational support
4. Results of classifications and mapping capabilities from potential of new sensors (pe.g. CP from RCM, combination of different sensors
5. Sea Ice short-term and long-term ice forecasting to support maritime activities
6. Long-term trends from relevant ice chart archives and applicability for validation and climatology
7. Evaluation and assessment of uncertainties in sea ice mapping techniques for climate, sea ice forecasting and operational support for navigational safety
8. Sea Ice Prediction Network (SIPN)-South review of previous Antarctic sea-ice forecasting experiments
9. Sea-ice modeling/data assimilation for regional and global sea ice forecasting
10. Ice edge prediction system including operational deployment (calibration, validation, and operational usage)
11. Climatology of regional and hemispheric sea ice based on ice charting: past and present extremes
12. Assessment of navigability of East Antarctic coastal sites for non-icebreakers
National ice and weather services are considered the authoritative source to provide routine information in order for the public to make informed decisions for safety, life and property and we operate under the same guidelines and align with common WMO standards. This facilitates critical information exchanges between different national services and agencies and ensures forecasters comply with similar operating specifications/competencies, when providing vital information for communities. National ice services will need to expand their portfolios to include additional sea-ice parameters in routine ice charts and offer more short-to-midterm sea-ice forecasts that are developed at spatial resolutions necessary for safe navigation through ice-encumbered areas. This effort and data assimilation will require the implementation of intelligent automation techniques that have not been demonstrated by the current suite of products available at data centers. This special issue will aim to accomplish the following goals with 1) the dissemination of how individual ice services operate and their mandates, 2) communicate relevant research that will be required to support maritime activities in the future and 3) mitigate confusion between data and operational centers to present clear examples of potentially useful research that is being done with the complimentary submissions of research papers that are expected to be included in this journal.
This Research Topic welcomes submissions on:
1. Individual operational ice service mandates (past, present and future), descriptions of individual routine products including ice charts, forecast and climatology products, and validation metrics.
2. Automatic sea ice classification using multi-frequency SAR band synergies
3. Automated ice mapping supervised and unsupervised classification for navigational support
4. Results of classifications and mapping capabilities from potential of new sensors (pe.g. CP from RCM, combination of different sensors
5. Sea Ice short-term and long-term ice forecasting to support maritime activities
6. Long-term trends from relevant ice chart archives and applicability for validation and climatology
7. Evaluation and assessment of uncertainties in sea ice mapping techniques for climate, sea ice forecasting and operational support for navigational safety
8. Sea Ice Prediction Network (SIPN)-South review of previous Antarctic sea-ice forecasting experiments
9. Sea-ice modeling/data assimilation for regional and global sea ice forecasting
10. Ice edge prediction system including operational deployment (calibration, validation, and operational usage)
11. Climatology of regional and hemispheric sea ice based on ice charting: past and present extremes
12. Assessment of navigability of East Antarctic coastal sites for non-icebreakers
Keywords: Sea Ice, Navigational Safety, Operational Ice Monitoring, Automated Sea Ice Classification, Arctic and Antarctic
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
