Seasonal Sea Ice Presence Forecasting of Hudson Bay using Seq2Seq Learning (Papers Track)
Nazanin Asadi (University of Waterloo); K Andrea Scott (University of Waterloo); Philippe Lamontagne (National Research Council Canada)
Abstract
Accurate and timely forecasts of sea ice conditions are crucial for safe shipping operations in the Canadian Arctic and other ice-infested waters. Given the advancement of machine-learning methods and the recent observations on the declining trend of Arctic sea ice extent over the past decades due to global warming, new machine learning approaches are deployed to provide additional sea ice forecasting products. This study is novel in comparison with previous machine learning (ML) approaches in the sea-ice forecasting domain as it provides a daily spatial map of probability of ice presence in the domain up to 90 days. The predictions are further used to predict freeze-up/breakup dates and show their capability to capture both the variability and the increasing trend of open water season in the domain over the past decades.