Arctic Cross-Copernicus forecast products for sea Ice and iceBERGs

Sea ice and icebergs are a major security risk for navigation and fisheries in Arctic waters. Both will remain a significant threat even in a warmer Arctic, where traffic is expected to increase.

Sea Ice Services are needed more and more to support less experienced captains with automated high quality forecasts and new information about icebergs that are not available today.To monitor and forecast sea ice types and icebergs ahead of time, adequate forecasts of sea ice, ocean, wind, and wave conditions for the whole Arctic are crucial.

The Copernicus Marine and Climate Change Services provide such information products. However their uncertainties are not provided in a consistent and user-friendly manner. Reliable uncertainty estimates can however be based on forecast ensembles across the two Copernicus Services.

ACCIBERG will improve the quality of sea ice, and ocean products and their uncertainty estimates in both Copernicus Services.

It will also extend the coverage of the satellite detection of icebergs and develop a completely new iceberg forecast service.

ACCIBERG will build upon state of the art sea ice and ocean models, remote sensing algorithms, data assimilation and cloud computing to offer probabilistic sea ice and iceberg forecasts based on Copernicus data consistently.

National or commercial sea ice services are limited to smaller regions and will benefit from the increased accuracy and consistency across the Copernicus products. The new forecasts will be demonstrated in ACCIBERG by European Ice Services and ships of opportunity.

The new iceberg forecasts will be automated and validated, and benefit a wide range of user groups navigating in the Arctic, from fisheries to cruise tourism, including Marine Surveillance under the Copernicus Security Service.

We will provide prototype products ready to be implemented in the Copernicus services and accessible from a single entry point: its inherent cloud computing solution.