Ice Watch and App-development

Over the last six months, we have received many contributions through Ice Watch and testing of our new mobile application IceWatchApp. In total, the database consists of close to 10 000 individual sea ice observations from research, operations and polar tourism cruises in remote polar waters. To name a few vessels we currently have in our Ice Watch database; RV Kronprins Haakon, KV Svalbard, HI Sverdrup, Polarstern and Akademik Fedorov.

Ice Watch is an international, collaborative program that is coordinating polar-wide visual sea ice observations collected from ships operating in ice-covered seas in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere with resources to:

  • Record ship-based sea ice observations using the software ASSIST and IceWatchApp

  • Access data collected on historical and current cruises using ASSIST

  • Archive and retrieve past observations

  • Openly provide all IceWatch information for use in calibration and validation applications

  • To incorporate collected data into the sea ice charting systems

If you are planning a cruise in the Arctic and are interested in collecting sea ice observations, we encourage you to contact us for details of how to get involved. Likewise, if you use or publish work using Ice Watch data we would like to hear from you so we can keep track of how the data is used.

Facebook: @icewatchassist
Twitter: @IceWatchASSIST
Email: icewatch@met.no

 

Images from the training manual for the IceWatchApp. Using your phone camera and the app to upload in situ sea ice observations. Once completed, your observations will be listed on your Ice Watch Project page. Each observation will be automatically georeferenced with longitude and latitude.

 

 


Sea ice observations provided from NPI cruise and the Nansen Legacy with RV Kronprins Haakon 24th-13th Sep 2020. https://icewatch.met.no/cruises/101
 


Arctic sea ice observations from the historical cruise to Northpole with KV Svalbard and CAATEX cruise 14th Aug to 9th Sep 2019. Many thanks to Norwegian Coastal Guard, Norwegian Coastal Administration and Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center.
https://icewatch.met.no/cruises/97