Local, timely, accurate ice info coming to Nunavut communities

David Jackson, director of the Canadian Ice Service and long-time veteran of the Canadian Coast Guard, says technological advancements, especially in the last decade or so, have made ice monitoring infinitely more accurate and timely. And with the climate change making ice conditions increasingly unpredictable, the timing couldn’t be better. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

A recent processed image created by the Canadian Ice Service which shows ice forming off the coast of Baffin Island near Clyde River Nov. 7. The CIS is hoping to provide much more detailed satellite radar images to northern communities in a three-year pilot project currently under way. (CANADIAN ICE SERVICE IMAGE)

(Updated 11 a.m. Nov. 18)

OTTAWA — For all those hunters and recreational snowmobilers in Nunavut who worry about fluctuating ice conditions — especially in spring and fall — good news is on the way.

The Canadian Ice Service is launching a three-year, $615,000 pilot project to see whether it’s possible to provide current, local ice conditions tailor-made for each community and what those maps, charts and other data might look like.

David Jackson, the CIS director, said Nov. 14 that his staff are meeting with government partners and will soon be consulting with a variety of northern coastal communities to see what kind of information northerners want and need to make their lives easier and safer.

“They will have more complete, more timely and more accurate information for daily activities, like hunting,” said Jackson from the CIS head offices in Ottawa’s Byward Market.

“The important thing is that communities will have input into defining what they want for ice information.”

Doreen Iqqaqsaq Taqtu, manager of the Arctic Bay Hunters and Trappers Organization, said most hunters and campers currently use Polar View, an international consortium which provides “earth observation products.”

But the images are not always as detailed as locals would like, Taqtu said, and they are not always current enough for planning outings. It’s important to know how thick the ice is and distance to the floe edge, she said, and welcomed the ice service pilot project.

“If I want to check certain areas to see if the ice is not good, sometimes you can’t tell,” Taqtu said. “It’s very important because when there’s ice, there are people going in and out, on the land. Most of the time, they need to know about ice conditions, especially when ice is melting.”

The project will be funded through the National Search and Rescue Secretariat — part of the Department of National Defence — Jackson said, because SAR officials believe this kind of detailed local information on the status and movement of ice will be useful during northern rescue operations.

So how detailed is that information? Infinitely more detailed and accurate than it used to be.

Jackson gave an overview of how the CIS — itself a part of Meteorological Service of Canada — has changed in the past six decades. And most of those changes have occurred because of technology.

Using mainly Canada’s Radarsat2 satellite, and MODIS instruments (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, ice service staff can now put together layered, mosaic images of ice conditions in Canadian waters.

Those mosaics are so detailed, you can see ice forming and melting, icebergs and ice islands, and, on a clear day with clear images, even gauge ice thickness.

All that is geared toward the CIS’s primary directive: “to provide timely accurate ice information to Canadians,” Jackson said.

Up until now, that information has be used mostly by the Canadian Coast Guard and maritime shipping companies, but an increasing number of scientists, academics and other individuals are tapping into the wealth of current and archived data available on the CIS website.

That’s why the CIS wants to reach out to northern coastal communities — roughly 40 in Canada — because of the importance of that information to local people, and the increasing ease of file transmission.

The Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (formerly Canada Centre for Remote Sensing) maintains two download stations, in Quebec and Saskatchewan, for capturing satellite radar images, Jackson said.

Those digital files are huge, sometimes measured in terabytes. A terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes so those mega files have to be reprocessed as smaller files for limited bandwith or else sent as compressed zip files so they can be received by local servers and even on board ships.

Jackson said depending on what local communities want, the CIS will likely set up individual FTP sites through which people can browse and view daily local ice information.

And after the Canadian Space Agency launches Radarsat Constellation in 2018 — a three-satellite configuration that will provide more reliable synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and capture 95 per cent of the country’s land and waters — the ice data available to Canadian and international clients will grow exponentially.

Staff can work magic on the future as well, Jackson said. Modelling specialists can take current ice and weather data, combine it with archive information and come up with algorithms to predict how ice will move through space and time.

They can show how ice will likely change in the short term, over the next 12 hours, say, or over the next 30 days.

“So the march of technology has changed everything,” Jackson said, “satellite technology, transmission capability and our ability to integrate it all.”

The CIS has another huge responsibility and that has to do with spotting, tracking and relaying information about pollution in Canadian waters.

The ice service runs something called the Integrated Satellite Tracking of Pollution program known by yet another acronym: ISTOP.

Trained specialists are able to scan satellite images which capture 90,000-square-kilometre chunks of Canada’s maritime areas and spot tiny anomalies — a smudge or streak that breaks up the normal, visual patterns of mottled surface ice or water.

Zooming in, CIS staff can pinpoint, for example, not only an oil spill but the ship that spilled it, process and interpret those images and then send them to Transport Canada and the Coast Guard’s Maritime Security branch within about an hour so authorities can begin investigating.

The CIS also has three aircraft — two Dash-8s and a Dash-7 — that are used for high and low altitude visual monitoring. The Dash-7 is based in the Arctic during shipping season, in Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay or Pond Inlet, but it’s been sent south now for the winter, Jackson said.

The ice service is hoping to begin supplying localized ice data information and images to northern communities in six to eight months, Jackson said.

“It’s a first for us,” Jackson said. “We’ve been involved in the Arctic for years but not at this intimate level. It’s going to be excellent for us.”

A coloured mosaic — an example of some of the new types of images or “products” that the CIS can produce — shows, in stunning detail, the North Water Polynya located between the southeastern tip of Ellesmere Island and Greenland in February 2014. (CANADIAN ICE SERVICE IMAGE)