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Timely information on sea ice and other met-ocean conditions is essential for all types of marine operations in Polar Regions. Polar waters represent a significantly higher degree of risk to shipping than most other waters, by the presence of ice fields, wind and waves, icing of vessels and darkness in the winter. The safety and efficiency of sea transportation, off-shore operations, and fisheries and other marine activities have been the motivation to establish operational sea ice monitoring and forecasting services in many countries. However, these services are usually limited to areas of national interest, leaving large parts of the Arctic without monitoring and forecasting services. In addition to operators of vessels and offshore structures in Polar Regions, the routine mapping of sea ice on a global scale is important for stakeholders in the areas of climate monitoring, environmental protection and sustainable resource management. Polar View's global sea ice monitoring service fills this gap and constitutes an important source of information for operational, scientific and regulatory users. The service builds on existing capabilities by providing global sea ice products at improved spatial resolutions for the entire Arctic ocean. Products currently available include low and medium resolution global ice classification and concentration, as well as ice drift vectors derived from scatterometer, passive microwave and SAR data. The following products are currently available: Low-resolution ice drift maps
Medium-resolution ice concentration maps
High-resolution global SAR mosaics
The global sea ice monitoring service is provided through three supply chains implemented at IFREMER, University of Bremen and eOsphere, respectively. IFREMER provides low-resolution products generated from SEAWINDS scatterometer data and SSM/I passive microwave imagery. IFREMER also provides, on a operational bases: daily backscatter data (for Ice type discrimination) and Arctic sea ice drift at different time and space scales. The University of Bremen produces medium resolution sea ice concentration maps from AMSR-E passive microwave data. High-resolution mosaics of ENVISAT ASAR Global Mode imagery are produced by eOsphere. Ice concentration and drift maps are subsequently made available to the public via designated websites. Process Flow of the Global Sea Ice Monitoring Service
Antarctic Services Global sea ice monitoring for the Antarctic will be based on a number of the services developed in the Northern hemisphere, as discussed above. The services that will be provided in the antarctic as outlined in the table below. Danish Technology University (DTU) also joins the team of services providers. A number of differences between sea-ice in the Antarctic compared to the Arctic need to be taken into account. Southern hemisphere sea-ice cover is larger and shows a much larger yearly variability between 1 and 18 x 106 km2, compared to 6 and 14 x 106 km2 in the Arctic. A smaller volume of ship traffic in the south means less interest by the national ice services in the antarctic sea ice, and fewer ice charts are produced based on less information than is available in the Arctic. The use of these lower resolution data is the only way of providing regular information covering the entire Southern Ocean. This is the best information available to ship operators ahead of receiving any planned higher resolution information during their voyage.
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