Artificial intelligence could revolutionize sea ice warnings

For vessels that journey into the polar seas, keeping control of the spread of sea ice is critical, which means that large resources are spent to collect data and determine future developments to provide reliable sea ice warnings. "As of now, large resources are needed to create these ice warnings, and most of them are made by The Norwegian Meteorological Institute and similar centres", Sindre Markus Fritzner tells us. He is a Doctoral Research Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Fritzner is employed at the Department of Physics and Technology and has recently submitted a doctoral thesis where he has looked at the option of using artificial intelligence to make ice warnings faster, better, and more accessible than they are today. The ice warnings used today are traditionally based on dynamic computer models that are fed with satellite observations of the ice cover, and whatever updated data can be gathered about ice thickness and snow depth.