Ice Monitoring
Ice monitoring involves continuous monitoring of ice thickness in port harbors and freezing shipping routes. It is conducted to ensure safe vessel navigation, enhance navigation speed through partially ice-covered waters, plan icebreaker escorts in ice-prone areas, and facilitate ice passage.
Ice monitoring capabilities include:
- Detecting large ice channels, cracks, fractures, floes, fields, hummocks, leads, and assessing their degrading parameters during the initial ice melting period,
- Identifying ice posing potential hazards and determining its parameters – area occupied, geographical coordinates,
- Identifying areas of ice attenuation and compression increase;
- Determining periods when waterways will clear of ice formations,
- Detecting icebergs and identifying iceberg water areas, determining their parameters.
Ice condition monitoring utilizes tools convenient for observation and data processing obtained from radar and optical instruments. Monitoring can be performed on land or from the ship's cabin. It can be connected to onboard navigation systems like IceRadar, ECD-IS, and client reference systems.
Key monitoring features include:
- Rapid acquisition of satellite photos,
- Diverse spectrum of ice products (photometric and meteorological maps with varying image quality and information update rates),
- Graphic editor, easy to understand and use,
- Quick photo editing,
- Option to adapt service functions to client tasks.
The service permits the use of basic and full product versions. In the basic version, only open data is available to the client. In the full version, clients can order commercial data generated by radars, for example, while a ship is in a specific water area.
If necessary, the service can be connected to systems providing vessel identification and control based on AIS data, as well as services forecasting weather conditions.
Ice Condition Monitoring
Ice condition monitoring is conducted using satellites. Radar images are captured daily and even several times a day regardless of cloud cover and illumination. Clients receive space imaging results via ftp data transmission protocol through a secure Web-GIS system within 24 hours after photography, and for territories within the reach zone of receiving stations – within 60 or 180 minutes after photography.
Based on acquired photos, an ice condition map conforming to World Meteorological Organization (WMO) standards is created. The map displays ridges of floes and hummocks, as well as floe-attached ice patches, if present in the photo and their sizes on the Earth's surface are sufficiently large to detect with the specified image spatial quality.
Analysis of ice crack formation is conducted, accounting for old and new cracks, different types of ice formations by crack density. As ice begins to melt in the area, monitoring of the "ice-water" melting boundary is conducted. A technical description accompanies each photo report based on each photo.
Information is delivered to the client via a secure web system or web interface, displayed visually without additional computer programs – only through a browser. Clients receive all specified products within three business days after photography.