Deliverable 3.3 Impact of observational strategies on Arctic navigation through improved performance of sea ice forecasts

The Arctic is a region of special concern because of its highly vulnerable environment
which is facing profound environmental changes because of global warming which in
this region is even amplified (also known as Arctic Amplification) compared to the
rest of the globe. To better understand and predict these changes coordinated and
accessible observations and information services in combination with models simulating
the Arctic environment are needed. Arctic PASSION addresses this urgent need for the
Arctic region and aims to pave the way forward towards a fully integrated Pan-Arctic
Observing System of Systems.
Forecasts of Arctic sea ice conditions are of crucial importance for indigenous
peoples and economic acitivies such as resource extraction, maritime transportation,
and tourism. We constructed several (mostly hypothetical) observational scenarios
and assessed their usefulness to constrain sea ice forecasts in data assimilation
systems. More specifically, we analyse the performance of 4-week forecasts of sea ice
volume and snow volume for selected regions along the Northern Sea Route and the
Northwest Passage as well as for the entire Arctic in spring. We show that the
combined assimilation of snow depth observations with satellite measurements of
radar freeboard from CryoSat-2 improves forecast performance. Excluding from our
system the contribution of the 7 snow buoys in the Russian Economic Zone to an
Arctic-wide network of 20 buoys can be overcompensated by increased sampling
density of 88 buoys outside that Zone.
The combined measurement and
representation uncertainty of the buoys has a large effect one the performance of the
networks.