Summary
The focus of CROSCIM is Arctic operations and the development of a processor that will take advantage of the novel products from the Copernicus Expansion missions and deliver near real time and short term forecast (up to 2 days) level 4 products for sea ice concentration, sea ice thickness, snow thickness, sea surface height anomaly and derived L4 products. The implementation will be co-developed with champion users and demonstrate how the Copernicus Expansion missions will improve the information for future Arctic operations. This will primarily focus on the added value from the polar missions: CRISTAL (dual frequency radar altimeter), ROSE-L (SAR L band) and CIMR (passive microwave).
The demonstration of the improvements will be based on two Arctic domains with different characteristics. The first is a pan Arctic that will demonstrate the value of the products from all three sensors and how they contribute with increased coverage and improved monitoring of the Arctic wide sea ice. The second demonstrator is a near coastal demonstration of the impact of ROSE-L, CRISTAL and CIMR products and how they will improve the observations of the sea ice coverage in a High Arctic fjord, namely Disko Bay in Greenland.
In order to provide a representative dataset for the future missions, a state of the art sea ice model and a state of the art machine learning model will be used to produce realistic data that mimics the products from the expansion missions. Data will be extracted and resampled according to the descriptions in the Mission Requirement Documents (MRD)’s of the individual satellite missions, which will make the foundation for creating a representative dataset. This will for instance include orbital and sensor characteristics, resolution and expected noise levels. In order to ensure maximum knowledge transfer from the missions to the project, the consortium includes expertise from the CRISTAL and CIMR MAG’s and representatives from the operational SAR processing group including the Greenlandic ice service, who will ensure that the representative data sets are designed according to the specifications.
The development of the representative dataset, the processor and the two demonstrators will be carried out in co-development with the two champion users involved in this proposal. These are the Greenlandic ice service at DMI and Drift+Noise who are both intermediate users with focus on the provision of services to the end user. Especially for a demonstration of future satellites it is important to incorporate champion users who both understand the future perspectives and the current needs of the users. The champion users will also ensure that the outreach to the end users are of relevance to the end users
