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12.14
- Polar View tracks massive B17B iceberg
drifting to the south of Australia
View
2008 News Items
On November 16th, Polar View service providers were able to pick up images of the massive B17B iceberg currently drifting to the south of Australia. The iceberg, which at the time was about 21 km long and 8 km wide, broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf some 10 years ago and had been drifting in the Southern Ocean until it recently began to make its way further north.
Polar View analysts picked up the iceberg on November 16th while doing scheduled detection for the Jules Verne sailing record attempt, a yacht race that will get underway sometime next year. Polar View has done iceberg monitoring for a number of yacht races, including the Volvo Ocean Yacht Race and the Antarctica Cup (see 2008 Polar View news item Polar View Provides Valuable Satellite Data to guide inaugural Antarctica Cup Ocean Race) Although it has been floating around for a decade, the B17B iceberg is significant because it is one of the biggest icebergs ever to be sighted so far north, and that an iceberg of this size occurs in these waters only once every hundred years. The iceberg's position on December 14th was at about 49.6 degrees South and 108.9 degrees East (about 1,500 km south of Albany, Western Australia) and is moving eastwards with the ocean currents south of Australia. The iceberg is now slowly breaking up into several hundred smaller icebergs - some of which are several kilometres long - reducing its overall length to 18 km and leaving fragments widely spread over a thousand kilometres of ocean. As this field of icebergs could be a potential hazard for ships travelling in the area, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology issued an advisory to mariners on December 9th.
Within the context of its monitoring programme for the Jules Verne sailing record attempt, Polar View will continue to provide satellite reconnaissance as the iceberg continues along its trajectory and disintegrates and will be available to provide active Earth observation surveillance if requested. [To obtain more information about Polar View's Iceberg Monitoring service, please visit our Iceberg Monitoring Service Page]
Finnish newspaper Turun Sanomat recently published an article highlighting the success of Polar View's services in the Baltic Sea region. The story noted that with funding from European Space Agency (ESA) in support of the Polar View project, ice chart and ice forecast services have been developed in the Baltic Sea Region over the past several years, and thanks to a funding extension they will continue for the next three years. The services have improved the safety and smoothness of maritime transportation in the Baltic Sea. In the Baltic Sea area, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), both key Polar View service providers, are providing sea ice forecasts. FMI's forecasts predict ice conditions for the next 45 hours with three-hour time steps, whereas SMHI's forecasts predict ice conditions two weeks in advance with one day time steps. "Our forecasts are designed for tactical navigation, where as SMHI's forecasts are aimed to help strategic decisions", says Ari Seina, Head of Ice Forecast and Ice Service at FMI. The forecasts are sent to Finnish and Swedish icebreakers, and also published on web pages. According to Mr. Seina these are the only operational ice forecasts publicly available in the Baltic Sea. The number of visitors at the web pages has grown rapidly since the service began. Three years ago there were 70,000 requests during the ice season; in 2009 there have already been 750,000 requests, 30% of which were from Finland. ESA's support for the Polar View project has also allowed snow services to be developed. In Finland, the Finnish Environmental Agency (SYKE) and FMI are publishing snow maps over Northern Europe and Northern Eurasia using remote sensing data assimilation along with ground truth. During the next three years FMI, SYKE and SMHI will be trying to find sustainable financing to continue the services. Click
here to visit Polar View at FMI [To view the on-line version of the article, Finnish Ice Forecasts are Directing Daily Navigation in the Baltic Sea - ESA's Support Secures Continuation of Service in Finland, please visit Turun Sanomat (in Finnish). To obtain more information about Polar View's monitoring and forecasting services in the Baltic Sea region, please visit our Baltic Sea Services Page]
New London, Connecticut's daily paper The Day recently examined the possibility of satellites eventually replacing reconnaissance missions to look for icebergs in the North Atlantic. This would be positive news for the Polar View team, which currently offers iceberg monitoring services supported by satellite technology. At the start of the International Ice Patrol's (IIP) annual conference held on December 2nd, Commander Scott Rogerson, commanding officer of the IIP, outlined a timeline for a transition to locating icebergs by satellite as satellite technology develops: reconnaissance flights would be phased out over the next ten years until 2020, when only satellites would be used. This would free up resources and personnel for other uses Before this happens, one of the main issues to be resolved is that there are not enough satellites in orbit at the moment to cover the same area the IIP monitors. Another is that satellite imagery is not always perfect, sometimes not able to distinguish between a ship and an iceberg. Bobby Pradeep, a project engineer from C-CORE (a Polar View team member and service provider), addressed these issues in comments given to The Day, saying that both the European and Canadian Space Agencies plan to launch more satellites in the next few years to help fill gaps in the lack of coverage, and that C-CORE plans to use higher resolution data during the upcoming 2010 iceberg season to show that it can single out icebergs. C-CORE and the IIP compare data to determine if satellites are detecting the icebergs the IIP finds during reconnaissance flights. [To view the article in full, please visit The Day online at www.theday.com, or to obtain more information about Polar View's Iceberg Monitoring service, please visit our Iceberg Monitoring Service Page]
With a recently announced new round of funding that will support activities until 2012, Polar View reflects on its accomplishments to date and plans for the future. Polar View has recently received recognition from the European Space Agency (ESA) as a valuable service worthy of continued funding under the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme. Since 2005, Polar View has been a “one stop shop” for a wide variety of earth observation products which monitor sea ice cover, glacier runoff, snow cover, snow melt, icebergs, river ice and lake ice. Products are delivered in an automated and timely manner to meet the specific needs of its growing number of diverse end users, which include government hydrological services, merchant vessels and icebreakers, the tourism industry in the Polar Regions and beyond, indigenous Arctic communities, and even long-distance yacht races. This new round of ESA funding will provide additional support to sustain Polar View’s activities from late 2009 until late 2012. However in the next few years the consortium intends to incorporate and become a self-sustaining legal entity independent from ESA and GMES funding. Costs of the services Polar View provides will be paid either directly by the end user or through local, national or international funding schemes. At the moment a majority of its services are entirely self-sustainable, with a view to becoming fully sustainable by 2012. The Key to Polar View’s Success Polar View’s success lies in its ability to forge connections between administrative and scientific networks, filling in gaps in observational capabilities. This approach has allowed the conglomerate to expand from just over 20 service providers and end users to more than 80 today. The high level of feedback Polar View receives from its end users has also made it possible for the conglomerate’s services to evolve and improve over time. “From the very beginning, Polar View has embraced the idea of being a needs-centred initiative…which ensures that our services will improve over time and better meet the needs of our end users,” said Thomas Puestow, Polar View Project Manager. Accomplishments Some results of Polar View’s unique and proactive approach to finding solutions to a wide range of specific user needs include:
The International Polar Foundation recently sat down with Polar View's Project Manager, Mr. Thomas Puestow of C-CORE, to talk about the emergence of Polar View as a key player, meeting user needs during International Polar Year and beyond. Since 2003 Polar View and its predecessor Northern View have been providing Earth observation services to a wide variety of end users all over the planet, including providing sea ice charts to help ships navigate in polar waters as well as monitoring melting snow and glaciers to improve meltwater runoff prediction for hydrological services. Supported under the GMES programme by the European Space Agency and the European Commission, with participation of the Canadian Space Agency, Polar View is a conglomerate of various companies, government agencies and research institutes across Europe and Canada, which hopes to eventually become an independent, self-sustaining enterprise providing a "one-stop-shop" for information about the cryosphere and the Polar Regions.
How did the Polar View project get started? Northern View, the predecessor of Polar View, started back in 2003 as a proposal submitted in response to a call issued by the European Space Agency under a new program at the time called GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security). The purpose of the program was to provide Earth-observation-based services to users for improved environmental monitoring and security-related monitoring. The program was based on the philosophy of providing "real services for real users", meaning that everything we do must be driven by user needs, accepted by users, and involve users when providing the services. In 2003 there were a variety of topics from water resource use to monitoring urban growth. But there were two initiatives that had a northern focus on ice and snow and other northern issues: Northern View and ICEMON. Both of these successful initiatives merged in 2005 to become Polar View. Currently our services focus on monitoring sea ice, icebergs, glacier melt, snow cover and snow melt, river ice and lake ice. How has Polar View evolved since then? We've become bigger. At the beginning the Polar View network consisted of 20-30 organizations. Today we have more than 80 organizations in the network, with the biggest part of them being end-users. The rest are service providers, supporting agencies and consulting organizations. We've also been turning out increasingly better products of higher quality with greater efficiency. Today we're producing more than 4000 products on an annual basis across our entire suite of service lines using 2500 to 3000 satellite images taken over the course of a year. And overall the use of our services has drastically increased. Just to give you an example, the number of requests for information on Baltic Sea ice conditions from the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), a Polar View member organization, increased tenfold between 2006 and 2009 during the January to May sea ice season. And our snow services have expanded from covering only part of Northern Europe and a limited area in the Alps to covering most of the Alps and all of Northern Europe and Asia. During the GSE extension phase, we plan to make the snow services more consolidated and coherent, and we're thinking about establishing common services for several different coverage areas. Can you pinpoint any key successes you've had along the way? I think the biggest success we've had is the fact that we continuously meet and in some cases exceed user requirements. From the very beginning Polar View has embraced the idea of being a needs-centred initiative, so our users are very actively involved and they offer regular feedback, which ensures that our services will improve over time and better meet the needs of our end users. And if the needs of a particular user changes over time, we adapt to the user's changing needs. Has Polar View provided any groundbreaking new services? For one thing Polar View has been able to put in place and run a successful sea ice monitoring operation in the Antarctic. Before we came along, there were only a few organizations that would offer sea ice monitoring services in the Antarctic, but the images weren't high resolution and they weren't delivered in real-time. Only since Polar View was established has there been a concerted effort to provide detailed, high-resolution ice charting in the Antarctic. And the same could be said for the Baltic Sea region. Before Polar View there was no publicly available sea ice forecasts for the Baltic Sea. Since then we've made it possible to have both short-term sea ice charts for immediate use and long-term sea ice forecasts for strategic planning. We've also been at the forefront of providing operational services for monitoring river and lake ice in Northern regions. The idea to do monitoring of this nature had been around for some time before Polar View came along, but I think it's the impetus of Polar View that has brought these kinds of services into an operational setting. River ice monitoring services have existed since 2003, and the lake ice monitoring service came along a little bit later. Both have done quite well so far. And Polar View has functioned as a catalyst to bring various user groups together in order to meet new potential end users and devise new services. For example Polar View helped various snow services establish a new cooperation forum called the International Snow Services Working Group. And bringing a number of stakeholders together led to the establishment of the highly successful Icebergfinder.com service, which helps both tourists and tour boat operators locate icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Have you been successful in raising the profile of earth observation services among key policy makers and helping them understand the importance of the kinds of services Polar View provides? This has been a goal from the very beginning. However since we focused so much on delivering our services to our users in the early years, this is not something we were able to achieve right away. But I'm happy to say that in the last couple of years there has been clear evidence that we've been making an impression at high levels, notably within the European Commission, with whom we have somewhat regular dialogue. We've also been able to use the Polar View network to our advantage, since it includes most of the major stakeholders concerned with operational monitoring in areas with snow and ice around the world. Polar View has initiated dialogue with a number of key stakeholders and we're continuing that dialogue. It's mostly through our users that policy-relevant decision stakeholders have learned about Polar View and the successes and impact that we've had. Through our networks Polar View has been able to attend meetings and be present at workshops where the audience very much appreciated Polar View's contributions, which has given us a good reputation and raised our profile. For example Polar View has been present at the UNFCC meetings such as the one in Poznan, Poland and Bonn, Germany. We've also initiated discussions with the working groups of the Arctic Council and the Arctic Council Secretariat, which recently opened in Tromsø, not to mention two discussions we've had with the GMES Bureau in Brussels. Work with stakeholders is something that can never really be finished. Yet it's starting to bear some fruit now and this dialogue will continue to be an integral part of the overall Polar View strategy. One of Polar View's main objectives has been to become self-sustaining. How far along have you come in reaching this objective? We've identified a whole suite of scenarios that can lead to Polar View's services being self-sustainable. We're working towards scenarios we hope over the next two or three years will be in place so that we'll no longer have to count on ESA funding to sustain Polar View's services. One of these scenarios is that end users eventually pay for the Polar View services they receive, either through a mechanism of them contracting out specific activities, or by creating those activities in-house. But other scenarios exist as well, such as the integration of a Polar View service into a national programme. This is happening in the case of many of our sea ice monitoring services, where a third party becomes responsible for the financing of a particular service. Some services will become a part of GMES Core Service My Ocean project, for example. We operate using a bunch of these different scenarios, and different services may have more than one scenario that applies to them. In terms of the end users paying for a service, that's probably the smallest number of users - maybe about ten or so - and to date we have financial commitments from half of them. But for the remaining users, some of them support Polar View by undertaking dedicated field campaigns to get the word out about the benefits of our services. The value of these campaigns often exceeds the cost of any particular service we provide for them. We regularly review the state of affairs as far as sustainability is concerned and continuously revise the potential scenarios we're looking at. We have targets that may move a little bit here and there, but overall I think our sustainability targets are realistic. How has Polar View contributed to the recent International Polar Year (IPY)? Polar View itself was recognized as an official IPY project early on in its own right, and we've made plenty of contributions. I think our biggest contribution has been the creation of the IPY Ice Logistics Portal in cooperation with JCOMM, ETSI (Expert Team on Sea Ice) and IICWG (International Ice Charting Working Group). Before Polar View came along, ice charts were published separately by a variety of national ice services. Any end user interested in sea ice information and sea ice charts for a given area would have to go to a number of different ice services to get all the necessary information they needed. However this required knowing which ice service covered which areas beforehand. So Polar View was able to bring a certain level of integration to all the world's sea ice services, making it easier for users to access sea ice information. We created this portal, which effectively divides up the world's seas geographically, and then all of the sea ice products generated by any of our participating sea ice services end up being posted on the portal. We don't change the data at all; it's the same data that exists directly through each of the conventional channels. The only difference is that all sea ice-related information is posted in one place to make it more convenient for users to access and to easily switch between coverage areas when travelling by ship for example. In the spirit of the IPY, the portal has been made available to the public. We don't keep a record of who's been using it, but we do keep tabs on the number of downloads there have been. Since the Ice Logistics Portal was set up in May of 2007, there have been more than 100,000 data downloads from the portal, and the number of downloads has grown exponentially. What about other projects Polar View has been involved with? In November 2007 the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry (ICR) in Kautokeino, Norway became an important partner of Polar View under the IPY EALÁT project (n°399). The EALÁT project is studying how climate change is affecting snow cover and reindeer habitats in northern Scandinavia where the Sámi practice reindeer husbandry. In this part of the world variations in snow and ice cover can have a major impact on how much food is available for reindeer to eat. So the ICR was very interested in getting up-to-date and accurate information on such things as snow cover and the change of snow cover over years and between seasons in order to better understand the effects snow cover can have on reindeer habitats and feeding grounds in northern Scandinavia. There has also been dialogue on what other kinds of needs exist for reindeer herders and what other kinds of services Polar View could provide them, so we're looking forward to continuing this partnership as the EALÁT project continues over the next few years. As you're aware, the North is a vast area with very few people living in it, so it's important to work with key user groups like reindeer herders to make sure we're giving the best possible benefits to them and other stakeholders who are concerned with environmental monitoring, resource management, sustainable land use and other Northern issues. Has Polar View been able to make any other key partnerships such as the partnership you have with EALÁT? All of Polar View's end users are important. A few of them are naturally more prominent, largely because they have a function that goes well beyond the immediate region where they're immediately located and are able to speak about more than their immediate interests, and those are some of the end users we invite to workshops and send to important meetings as representatives of Polar View. The ICR, which speaks on behalf of reindeer herders from all over northern Europe and northern Russia, is a good example of this. But I would say on the whole we have established extremely good relationships with all of our end users. Where do you see Polar View heading in the next few years? We're currently working on moving Polar View beyond simply being an ESA project and giving Polar View its own legal status in a way. We hope to have the organization incorporated somewhere in some shape or form in the not too distant future, which would make it possible to open up other funding possibilities and allow Polar View to be in a position where we can act and speak as our own independent organization as opposed to merely as a project. Has Polar View lived up to initial expectations? I think Polar Has lived up to and exceeded its expectations. We've received nothing but excellent feedback from ESA and our end users. We have certainly come a long way from the first proposal that we made back in 2003. The fact that we're trying to make Polar View a more permanent and self-sustaining organization was not something that was envisioned at the very beginning, so I definitely think that right now we're at a place we were never expecting to be. Are there any other areas of Earth observation that you have not investigated so far that you'd like to investigate? Earth observation will always be a key tool simply because collecting observations and data in any other way is frequently inefficient and to costly. However we don't want to limit ourselves to Earth observation. There are other sources of data and sources of information that could be integrated with Earth observation data in order to better meet the needs of our end users. The information people need does not consist of isolated things like a single snow map, a single glacier map, or a single sea ice chart. More often they have more complex needs requiring a variety of information, which includes land use, information about populations, about habitats and about trends, all of which needs to be taken into account when decisions are being made about Northern areas and the Antarctic. This may ultimately include other things such as in-situ observations and other sources of data. So far we've been constrained by the fact that Polar View is a project funded under a specific funding umbrella, and due to these limitations, there has been a necessity to streamline what we do so there's no perceived overlap with other activities also receiving funding under a similar funding scheme. Polar View has always had the ambition to become a one-stop shop for a wide range of polar and cryosphere-related information. We might not generate all of that information, but in the same vein as the IPY Ice Logistics Portal, Polar View may very well become a convenient node through which various users can easily access the different kinds of information they need. Fine-tuning this will be part of Polar View's workload in the next few years. The key thing for Polar View to do right
now is continue in the same direction that we've been going and make
sure that we remain in tune with the requirements of users. There are
plenty of needs out there that remain to be addressed and we certainly
will strive to meet these in the future. However right now what we're
doing is not dictated by the requirements of users so much as limits
to funding, so becoming our own entity will be key in reaching this
goal.
Chandra Mahabir, Manager of the River Engineering Section at Environment Alberta, recently spoke about her positive experiences using the Polar View River Ice Monitoring Service. The service uses RadarSat and ENVISAT satellite data to monitor the Peace and Athabasca Rivers for the communities of Peace River and Fort McMurray respectively in northern Alberta. Why exactly do you monitor the Peace and Athabasca Rivers? The reason we monitor these two rivers is because they do have a particularly long history of ice jam flooding. The last large river ice floods in the towns of Peace River and Fort McMurray occurred in 1997. Although economic damages were in excess of a million dollars Canadian, we were fortunate that no lives were lost.
It depends where and what's happening. On the Athabasca River we're looking out for ice jams that have potential to impact Fort McMurray. Several small ice jams normally form on the Athabasca River and can be located hundreds of kilometres upstream of the community. If one jam releases, it can cause a cascade effect, with several small jams eventually forming a large jam. What we're looking for is the size and location of the jams upstream so that we can better understand the potential for the formation of a large river ice jam. On the Peace River we also monitor the ice front during freeze-up in addition to break-up. River flows on the Peace River are regulated by hydroelectric dams. Flow releases from the reservoirs are higher than natural conditions resulting in higher river freeze-up levels. Monitoring the progress of the freeze-up process provides information for operational decisions as flow releases may be adjusted to decrease the potential for a freeze-up ice jam near the town site. Is there a risk of flooding during freeze-up as well? For the Town of Peace River, groundwater seepage into homes is a concern. This will occur when the river freeze up occurs at unusually high levels. Monitoring the progress of river ice formation assists us in developing our knowledge of the river ice processes in hopes to better manage conditions in the future. How did Polar View become involved with helping you monitor these two rivers? Dr. Faye Hicks from the University of Alberta approached us with the concept of satellite monitoring and had done some preliminary work showing that it could be a beneficial operational tool. C-CORE invited Alberta Environment to be a partner in the Polar View program and help in the process of ongoing validation of their new EO-based River Ice Monitoring Service. Alberta Environment provides ground truth information from aerial flights, which coincide with satellite images. Alberta Environment also provides Polar View with an annual report on the accuracy of each satellite acquisition and how well it corresponds with aerial flights. This lets both parties know how much progress is being made with the accuracy and reliability of the River Ice Monitoring Service. The validation work for this service is an ongoing process of constant improvements occurring each year. How often do you get new images during the seasons you do monitoring? It depends on what we're looking at. Working with C-CORE has helped us figure out what we need as far as imagery is concerned and when we need it. If we're monitoring ice break-up on the Athabasca River, then we really push to have a six to twelve-hour turnaround time on the images. But if we're monitoring the Peace River, then having images within 24 hours is fine. So for the past few years you've basically been seeing how the Polar View service can be of use to Alberta Environment? Yes. Actually last year was the first year where we went into contract with C-CORE and started to pay for some of the services. We hired C-CORE on a prototype project to look at the Peace River. But because of experiences we've had with the service during the trial period over the past several years, we were better able to articulate our needs such as frequency and required display information. Our work with Polar View and C-CORE has lead to a better understanding of satellite data. And before this you were just doing overflights in a plane? Yes. We continue to do this because we haven't seen the reliability in the images on the Athabasca River to create the confidence needed to replace the flights. However there has been a dramatic improvement from when we started working with C-CORE almost four years ago. How do you get the images? For the Peace River, we usually get them by e-mail. For the spring break-up on the Athabasca River it's put on a website with the option to download the images. Because we are still testing the usefulness of satellite images in operations, we review and evaluate each image in comparison with the observed data. How often do you get the images? For the Peace River we set up a schedule in which we asked for ten images at the most likely time for the satellite to be passing over the freeze-up zones. River ice break-up is challenging because images are only needed for about 4 days but it is difficult to determine before hand when these days will be. We spread out our request for the images out over two or three weeks so we're absolutely sure of getting what we're looking for. For freeze-up on the Peace River, we usually need the imagery between Christmas and mid-January. Break-up on both rivers usually happens in April between the 8th and 28th usually, so we need them for about a 20-day window. Do you need any images between freeze-up and break-up? During freeze-up and break-up, the ice is not changing so images are not required. We have been collecting one image at the beginning of March to look at freeze-up jams on the Athabasca. We've found it to be very useful for communicating to people where the freeze-up jams are because it allows them to get a visual idea of it, and it gives us an idea of conditions going into the break-up season. Do you do more with these images than simply look at them to see what the ice is doing? We also use them to build public awareness and inform our emergency disaster coordinators. We usually give the preliminary image we get for the Athabasca River to emergency operations centres for when they go into the communities to do briefings of what to expect for the upcoming river ice break-up season. If we see an image that we think is correct and a good representation of what we're seeing in the field, we'll use it for explanation purposes. For the Peace River, we use the images in our municipal education meeting. The River Forecast Section also provides public education through presentations where we provide information about the products we're looking at to advance the ice monitoring programmes. How much progress has been made compared to when you first started getting images four years ago? We provide Polar View with an annual report in which we go through each image and let them know whether it was useful or not. It lets both parties know how much progress we're making or not making. These reports are available from Alberta Environment by e-mailing a request to AE.River@gov.ab.ca. What in your opinion is the most useful aspect of the Polar View service? For us I think the most useful aspect comes when we have severe weather conditions and we can't send out observation flights. Satellite images come through regardless of weather. So to me it would be great if we could get the satellite service operating at a confidence level we can rely on. Will you continue to use Polar View's services? Right now the original project has come to an end, and we're in a bridge funding period. If C-CORE were to initiate another project, we would definitely participate because we've seen real advances and benefits. But if you're asking me "Are you willing to invest in this and change your operational tools?" I'd have to say that we're not at that point yet. We would still need to see some development over a few more years before we got to a point where we could completely replace aerial observation flights with satellite images. We're currently paying for the Peace River service because it has reached the point where the images were worth moving to the evaluation phase. On the Athabasca, since only about half of the images are useful, we're not willing to pay full price for those images yet because we don't have the kind of reliability we need yet, so it would be an additional expense rather than shifting funds form one way of gathering information to another. What I do see as a bigger potential for the service for Alberta Environment is monitoring more remote areas to a higher degree, including areas further north in the province that we don't monitor at the moment. Monitoring these areas by plane would not be a possibility because we already have planes going on three-hour reconnaissance. Anything more than three hours is not feasible. So satellite imagery might be the only option for remote places in the province, like the Peace-Athabasca Delta (PAD). Why would you want to monitor up there? Firstly for ecological reasons. The PAD is where the Peace River and the Athabasca River come together. There has been a lot of money put into research to study that delta, and it seems that the delta gets replenished with water every time there's an ice jam. So the ice jams are important, but for more ecological renewal than they are for flood concerns. Secondly, for provincial agreements. The Peace River starts in the province of British Columbia, flows through Alberta to the PAD where it joins the Athabasca River and then continues as the Slave River into the Northwest Territories. That's two provinces and one territory all sharing the same water. Thirdly, I think in the next decade or so there will likely be development in northern Alberta. If population and industrial growth continues, we will see more demand on the water resources in the north. [To obtain more information about Polar
View's Rive Ice Monitoring service, please visit our River
Ice Monitoring Service Page, or contact Sherry McHugh of C-CORE
directly at sherry.mchugh@c-core.ca]
Euronews, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, recently produced a video to highlight Polar View's progress in making earth observation relevant and accessible to users interested in changing snow and ice conditions in central Europe.
Please click here to watch the video. [To obtain more information about Polar View's Snow and Ice Monitoring service, please visit our Services Page]
CNN's online technology news service recently featured a story about the importance of Polar View's snow monitoring services in assisting the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry (ICR) view the arctic regions by satellite to gather information on changing snow conditions.
[To obtain more information about Polar View's Snow Monitoring service, please visit our Snow Monitoring Service Page]
Case studies are presented demonstrating how Polar View services can offer vital assistance in adapting to climate change in regions influenced by ice and snow
[To download a copy of the brochure, please visit our Promotional Material Section]
Polar View satellite data effectively integrated with traditional ecological knowledge to support lake ice monitoring program in northern Canada
The full text of this article as well as an interview with the lead member of the program is available at Science Poles (Full Article) and Science Poles (Interview). Science Poles is the scientific website of the International Polar Foundation. A related article is also featured on the International Polar Year website. |
After
having followed an east by north-easterly trajectory, the B17B iceberg
is currently moving along with the ocean currents to the south of Australia.
It was spotted heading on its current trajectory by glaciologist Neal
Young from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) using satellite images
taken by NASA and ESA.
The
two photos included with this news item show satellite images of B17B
from November 6 (ENVISAT) and December 14 (TerraSAR-X). Note that a
major calving event has occurred between these two dates. The TerraSAR-X
image shows hundreds of icebergs not previously seen in the ENVISAT
image. In particular, the large ice island sitting right next to B17B
(lower right) on November 6 can now be seen about 50 km to the South
East of B17B in the December 14 image.
In
this interview, Polar View's Project Manager, Thomas Puestow of C-CORE,
discusses has a look at how the organization he is in charge of came
to be a major player in providing earth observation services, Polar
View's contribution to the IPY and where Polar View is headed in the
next few years.
What
exactly are you looking for?
The
climate change brochure provides a summary of Polar View services that
address public and private sector climate change adaptation needs. Ice
and snow are projected to undergo far-reaching changes in the years
and decades to come. This translates into changing and emerging needs
for timely and reliable information on ice and show. Our booklet highlights
areas in which the Polar View team is working to implement technological
and institutional solutions to meet these changing needs, including
navigating ice-infested waters, assisting Arctic indigenous communities,
flood forecasting and improving water management for hydro-electricity.
The
Nunavik Research Centre (NRC), the research arm of Québec's Makivik
Corporation , is using traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) as
baseline data integrated with scientific data (provided by Polar View)
to achieve a better understanding of how climate change is affecting
ice cover in lakes and streams in Nunavik. This is important as changing
ice conditions are affecting populations of Arctic charr, a fish common
in the Arctic that the Inuit use as a staple food source. With the assistance
of both Polar View satellite data and expertise in earth observation,
the NRC hopes to be able to recommend more effective ways to help Nunavik's
Inuit adapt to the changing Arctic ecosystems.