An electronic charting system (MapViewer) on board of RV Polarstern enables users to visualize sea ice information from satellites and models. Data are made available from different providers through a request software in near-real time. The system administrator on board is responsible for the maintenance and setup of the MapViewer and the request software. Following data products are available per default. Others must be ordered in advance.
Default products
AMSR2 Sea Ice Concentration (Driftnoise.com)
Sea Ice Concentration data sourced from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, provided by Driftnoise.com. Sea ice concentration images for the Arctic and Antarctic are generated hourly from the 6km spatial resolution AMSR2 data. A running composite is a combination of multiple swaths of data; the latest swath extends the data of the previous composite image. For more information please contact Thomas Krumpen (Thomas.Krumpen@awi.de).
Sentinel 1 (Driftnoise.com)
Images from the high resolution radar sensor on board the Sentinel-1 satellites are provided by Drifnoise.com. The Sentinel-1 ESA mission comprises a constellation of two polar-orbiting satellites, operating day and night performing C-band synthetic aperture radar imaging, enabling them to acquire imagery regardless of the weather. Sentinel-1 works in a pre-programmed operation mode to avoid conflicts and to produce a consistent long-term data archive built for applications based on long time series. A software at AWI (http://framsat.driftnoise.com/) continuously monitors the ship position. If new scenes are available, images are centered around the ship and send on board. In addition, users can setup monitoring jobs, e.g. to investigate accessibility of different regions. For more information please contact Thomas Krumpen (Thomas.Krumpen@awi.de).
Sea Ice Drift (past 48 h from OSI-SAF)
The low resolution sea ice drift product from the EUMETSAT OSI SAF. Ice motion vectors with a time span of 48 hours are estimated by an advanced cross-correlation method (the Continuous MCC, CMCC) on pairs of satellite images. Several single-sensor products are available, along with a merged (multi-sensor) dataset. Data is made available once per day. For more information please contact Thomas Krumpen (Thomas.Krumpen@awi.de) or check http://osisaf.met.no/p/ice/lr_ice_drift.html.
Ice Drift, Concentration and Thickness Forecast (TOPAZ)
The TOPAZ system is an ocean forecasting system developed under the TOPAZ project in EC Framework V. The TOPAZ project was finished in 2003. The lessons learned in that project where carried into the MERSEA Strand 1 and MERSEA-IP projects, where the TOPAZ system has been run in a operational mode, providing weekly forecasts of ocean currents, ocean temperature and ice conditions in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Presently the model system used to provide forecasts covers the North Atlantic, Nordic and Arctic seas. It is based on the HYCOM ocean model and includes a sea-ice model. The TOPAZ system assimilates sea surface heights, surface temperature and sea ice concentrations on a weekly basis using the Ensemble Kalman Filter. Updates on board are made available once per day. Following parameters are provided: Sea ice drift, sea ice concentration, sea ice thickness for the next 5 days. For more information please see http://marine.copernicus.eu/
Upon request: TerraSAR-X of the German Aerospace Center (DLR)
TerraSAR-X images are high-resolution radar satellite data from polar orbiting satellites, operating day and night with a X-band synthetic aperture radar. The images are taken upon request that needs to be placed by the expedition leader no later than 17 hours before the requested time. After recording, the data are downloaded by the next possible down link to the receiving station. After the reception of the data, the images are pre-processed and compacted to a zip-file with a size of max. 2 MB. The zip-file contains a georeferenced png (only usable for GIS when the related xml and wld is in the same folder) and is send via email or ftp download link to the expedition leader and the MapView pull software. Mean delivery delay is between 30 min and 2 hours. For image requests, the expedition leader contacts: i) Paul Wachter (paul.wachter@dlr.de) for the Southern Ocean, or ii) Suman Singha (suman.singha@dlr.de) for the Arctic Ocean. Images from the German TerraSAR-X satellite are distributed commercially and are restricted to license agreements between the user and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). AWI has signed a license agreement for images requested for the voyages against the background to support a smooth operation. Additional requests can be made by contacting the respective person named above or via AWI contact person Christine Wesche (christine.wesche@awi.de)